B    3    321    Et.fi 


H'C 'Banner 


JERSEY  STREET 
AND  JERSEY   LANE 


A  TANGLED   PATH 


JERSEY   STREET 
AND   JERSEY    LANE 

URBAN  AND  SUBURBAN  SKETCHES 


BY 

H.  C.  BUNNER 


ILLUSTRATED    BY 

A.  B.  FROST,    B.  WEST  CLINEDINST,  IRVING   R.  WILES 
AND    KENNETH    FRAZIER 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S   SONS 

1896 


COPYRIGHT,  1893,  1894,  1895,  1896,  BY 
CHARLES   SCRIHNER'S   SONS 


Press  of  J.  J.  Little  &  Co. 
Astor  Place,  New  York 


PS 


TO 

A.  L.  B. 


iv.295967 


CONTENTS 

JERSEY  AND  MULBERRY    .        .        .        .        .        .       i 

TIEMANN'S  TO  TUBBY  HOOK       .        .        .   '     .         33 
THE  BOWERY  AND  BOHEMIA  .         .        .        .         .67 

THE  STORY  OF  A  PATH        .        .        .        .        .99 

THE  LOST  CHILD 135 

A  LETTER  TO  TOWN -        '75 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


A  tangled  path  .  .  .          FRONTISPIECE 


PAGE 


"  77^6'  old  lady  sat  down  and  wrote  that  letter"  .  -  6 
"  Sometimes  a  woman  with  a  shawl  over  her 

head  *  *  exchanges  a  few  words  with  him"  9 
"  And  down  in  the  big,  red  chair  big  sister  plunks 

little  sister  "  !2 

"  Then  there  is  Mamie,  the  pretty  girl  in  the  win- 

dow  "          .         ...         .         .         .         .         .14 

"  And  plays  on  the  Italian  bagpipes  "  .  .  .16 
"  A  Jewish  sweater  with  coats  on  his  shoulder"  20 
"  Glass-put-in  man"  ...  21 

"  Poor  woman  with  market-basket"  .  .  .21 
"A  Chinaman  who  stalks  on  with  no  expression 

at  all" 24 

"  The  children  are  dancing" 25 

"  The  girl  you  loved  was  *  *  *  really  grown  up 

and  too  old  for  you"          ...  36 


xii  List  of  Illustrations 

PAGE 

"  ^/  few  of  the  old  family  estates  were  kept  up 

after  a  fashion"       .         .         .         .         .  40 

"  A  random  goat  of  poverty  "          .         .         .  41 

"  The  paint  works  that  had  paid  for  its  building"     45 
"  A  mansion  imposing  still  in  spite  of  age  "  .         -49 
"  She  wound  tJie  great,  tall,  white  columns  with 

these  strips  ".......     53 

"Here  also  was  a  certain  dell"      .         .         .         -57 
"  The  railroad  embankment  beyond  which  lay  the 

pretty ,  blue  Hudson"        ...  -59 

"  The  wreck  of  the  woods  where  I  used  to  scram 
ble"    .         .         .         .         .         .         .       '.         .60 

"  A  little  enclosure  that  is  called  a  park  "     .         .63 
"  //  was  a  very  pretty  young  lady  who    opened 

the  door  " .         .     64 

"  An    old  gentleman  from    Rondout-on-t he-Hud 
son"  .         .         .        .         .     "    .         .         .         -7° 
"  Young  gentlemen  sitting  in  a  pot-Jiouse  at  high 

noon " •     72 

"  A  gentleman  permanently  in  temporary  difficul 
ties  "  . 74 

"  A  jackal  is  a  man  generally  of  good  address  "  .     81 
"  77/6'  Bowery  is  the  most  marvellous   thorough 
fare  in  the  world"  .  •     85 


List  of  Illustrations  xiii 

PAGE 

"  Afore  and  stranger  wares  tJian  uptown  people 

ever  heard  of"  .         .         .         .         .         .         .89 

"Probably  the  edibles  are  in  the  majority"  .  -91 
"  The  Polish  Jews  with  their  back-yards  full  of 

chickens  "  .         .  .  .         .         .         .         .93 

"  The  Anarchist  Russians  "  .  .  .  ,  .  94 
"  The  Scandinavians  of  all  sorts  who  conic  up 

from  the  wharfs "  .  .  .  .96 

"  Through  the  rich  man's  country"  .  .  .  108 
"  A  convenient  way  through  the  woods  "  .  .112 
"  The  lonely  old  trapper  who  had  dwelt  on  tJiat 

mountain"          .  .         .         ...          .114 

"  Malvina  Dodd*  *  *  took  the  winding  track  that 

her  husband  had  laid  out"  .  .  v  .118 
"  Here,  the  old  man  would  sit  down  and  wait"  .  120 
"  He  did  a  little  grading  wit]i  a  mattock"  .  .121 
"  The  laborers  found  it  and  took  it"  .  .  .125 
"  The  tinkers  ***  and  the  rest  of  the  old-time 

gentry  of  the  road"  .  .•  .  .  .-  .128 
"  I  used  to  go  down  that  path  on  the  dead  run  "  .  131 
"  'I'm  Latimer'  said  the  man  o?i  the  horse"  .  139 
"  That  boy  of  Penrhyn's — the  little  one  with  the 

yellow  hair"      .         .         .         .         .         .         .143 

"  Lanterns  and  hand  lamps  dimly  lit  up  faces  "  .  149 


xiv  List  of  Illustrations 

"  The  river,  the  river, — oh,  my  boy  !"   .         .         .152 
"  77/6'  father  leaned  forward   and    clutched   the 

arms  of  Jiis  chair"  .         .         .         .         .         .    155 

"  They  had  just  met  after  a  long  beat"          *         .164 
"  Half  a  dozen  men  naked  to  the  waist  scrubbing 

tliemselves "  .         .         .         .         .         .167 

"  77/6'  mother  knew  that  her  lost  child  was  found"  173 
"  77/6'  desperate  yoitng  men  of  the  bachelor  apart 
ments"       .  .         .         .         .         .         .180 

"  77/6-  hot,  lifeless  days  of  siunnier  in  your  town 

Jiouse "  .         .  .         .  -183 

"  '  77iafs  no  Jo  Jinny-jump  er  !'"  .         .         .         .185 

"  Other  local  troubles"    .         .        .  .         .189 

"  You  send  for  Pat  Brannigan  "    .         .         .         .192 

"A  little  plain  strip  of  paper  headed  'Memoran 
dum  of  sale '  "  .         ..         .        .         .         .         .  200 


JERSEY   AND   MULBERRY 


JERSEY   AND   MULBERRY 

I    FOUND   this   letter  and   comment   in   an 
evening  paper,  some  time  ago,  and  I  cut 
the  slip  out  and  kept  it  for  its  cruelty : 

To  THE  EDITOR  OF  THE  EVENING . 

SIR  :  In  yesterday's  issue  you  took  occasion  to  speak 
of  the  organ-grinding  nuisance,  about  which  I  hope 
you  will  let  me  ask  you  the  following  questions :  Why 
must  decent  people  all  over  town  suffer  these  pestilen 
tial  beggars  to  go  about  torturing  our  senses,  and 
practically  blackmailing  the  listeners  into  paying  them 
to  go  away  ?  Is  it  not  a  most  ridiculous  excuse  on  the 
part  of  the  police,  when  ordered  to  arrest  these  va 
grants,  to  tell  a  citizen  that  the  city  license  exempts 
these  public  nuisances  from  arrest  ?  Let  me  ask,  Can 
the  city  by  any  means  legalize  a  common-law  misde 
meanor  ?  If  not,  how  can  the  city  authorities  grant 
exemption  to  these  sturdy  beggars  and  vagrants  by 
their  paying  for  a  license  ?  The  Penal  Code  and  the 
Code  of  Criminal  Procedure,  it  seems,  provide  for  the 


4  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

punishment  of  gamblers,  dive-keepers,  and  other  dis 
orderly  persons,  among  whom  organ-grinders  fall,  as 
being  people  \vho  beg,  and  exhibit  for  money,  and 
create  disorder.  If  this  is  so,  why  can  the  police  not 
be  forced  to  intervene  and  forbid  them  their  outrageous 
behavior  ? — for  these  fellows  do  not  only  not  know  or 
care  for  the  observance  of  the  city  ordinance,  which 
certainly  is  binding  on  them,  but,  relying  on  a  fellow- 
feeling  of  vulgarity  with  the  mob,  resist  all  attempts 
made  to  remove  them  from  the  exercise  of  their  most 
fearful  beggary,  which  is  not  even  tolerated  any  longer 

at  Naples. 

R. 
NEW  YORK,  February  2oth. 

[Our  correspondent's  appeal  should  be  addressed  to 
the  Board  of  Aldermen  and  the  Mayor.  They  con 
sented  to  the  licensing  of  the  grinders  in  the  face  of  a 
popular  protest.— ED.  EVENING .] 

Now  certainly  that  was  not  a  good  letter  to 
write,  and  is  not  a  pleasant  letter  to  read ;  but 
the  worst  of  it  is,  I  am  afraid  that  you  can 
never  make  the  writer  of  it  understand  why  it 
is  unfair  and  unwise  and  downright  cruel. 

For  I  think  we  can  figure  out  the  personal 
ity  of  that  writer  pretty  easily.  She  is  a  nice 
old  or  middle-aged  lady,  unmarried,  of  course; 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  5 

well-to-do,  and  likely  to  leave  a  very  comfort 
able  fortune  behind  her  when  she  leaves  all 
worldly  things;  and  accustomed  to  a  great 
deal  of  deference  from  her  nephews  and  nieces. 
She  is  occasionally  subject  to  nervous  head 
aches,  and  she  wrote  this  letter  while  she  had 
one  of  her  headaches.  She  had  been  lying 
down  and  trying  to  get  a  wink  of  sleep  when 
the  organ-grinder  came  under  the  window.  It 
was  a  new  organ  and  very  loud,  and  its  organ- 
grinder  was  proud  of  it  and  ground  it  with  all 
his  might,  and  it  was  certainly  a  very  annoying 
instrument  to  delicate  ears  and  sensitive  nerves. 
Now,  she  might  have  got  rid  of  the  nuisance 
at  once  by  a  very  simple  expedient.  If  she 
had  sent  Abigail,  her  maid,  down  to  the  street, 
with  a  dime,  and  told  her  to  say:  "  Sicka  lady, 
no  playa, "  poor  Pedro  would  have  swung  his 
box  of  whistles  over  his  shoulder  and  trudged 

o 

contentedly  on.  But,  instead,  she  sent  Abi 
gail  clown  without  the  dime,  and  with  instruc 
tions  to  threaten  the  man  with  immediate 
arrest  and  imprisonment.  And  Abigail  went 
down  and  scolded  the  man  with  the  more  vigor 
that  she  herself  had  been  scolded  all  day  on 


Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


account  of  the  headache.  And  so  Pedro  just 
grinned  at  her  in  his  exasperating  furrin  way, 
and  played  on  until  he  got  good  and  ready  to  go. 
Then  he  went,  and  the  old  lady  sat  down  and 
wrote  that  letter,  and  gave  it  to  Abigail  to  post. 
Later  in  the  afternoon  the  old  lady  drove 

out,  a  n  cl  the 
fresh  air  did 
her  a  world  of 
good,  and  she 
stopped  at  a 
toy  store  and 
bought  s  o  in  e 
trifles  for  sister 
Mary's  little 
girl,  who  had 
the  measles. 
Then  she  came 
home,  and  after  dinner  she  read  Mr.  Jacob 
Riis's  book,  "  How  the  Other  Half  Lives;" 
and  she  shuddered  at  the  picture  of  the  Jersey 
Street  slums  on  the  title  page,  and  shuddered 
more  as  she  read  of  the  fourteen  people 
packed  in  one  room,  and  of  the  suffering  and 
squalor  and  misery  of  it  all.  And  then  she 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  7 

made  a  memorandum  to  give  a  larger  check  to 
the  charitable  society  next  time.  Then  she 
went  to  bed,  not  forgetting  first  to  read  her 
nightly  chapter  in  the  gospel  of  the  carpenter's 
son  of  Nazareth.  And  she  had  quite  forgot 
ten  all  about  the  coarse  and  unchristian  words 
she  had  written  in  the  letter  that  was  by  that 
time  passing  through  the  hands  of  the  weary 
night-shift  of  mail-clerks  down  in  the  General 
Post-office.  And  when  she  did  read  it  in 
print,  she  was  so  pleased  and  proud  of  the 
fluency  of  her  own  diction,  and  so  many  of 
her  nephews  and  nieces  said  so  many  admiring 
things  about  what  she  might  have  done  if  she 
had  only  gone  in  for  literature,  that  it  really 
never  occurred  to  her  at  all  to  think  whether 
she  had  been  any  more  just  and  charitable  than 
the  poor  ignorant  man  who  had  annoyed  her. 

She  was  especially  pleased  with  the  part 
that  had  the  legal  phraseology  in  it,  and  with 
the  scornful  rebuke  of  the  police  for  their  un 
willingness  to  disobey  municipal  ordinances. 
That  was  founded  partly  on  something  that 
she  had  heard  nephew  John  say  once,  and 
partly  on  a  general  idea  she  has  that  the 


8  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

present    administration    has    forcibly    usurped 
the  city  government. 

Now,  I  have  no  doubt  that  when  that  organ- 
grinder  went  home  at  night,  he  and  his  large 
family  laid  themselves  clown  to  rest  in  a  back 
room  of  the  Jersey  Street  slum,  and  if  it  be 
so,  I  may  sometimes  see  him  when  I  look  out 
of  a  certain  \vindow  of  the  great  red-brick 
building  where  my  office  is,  for  it  lies  on  Mul 
berry  Street,  between  Jersey  and  Houston. 
My  own  personal  and  private  window  looks 
out  on  Mulberry  Street.  It  is  in  a  little  den 
at  the  end  of  a  long  string  of  low-partitioned 
offices  stretching  along  the  Mulberry  Street 
side;  and  we  who  tenant  them  have  looked 
out  of  the  windows  for  so  many  years  that  we 
have  got  to  know,  at  least  by  sight,  a  great 
many  of  the  dwellers  thereabouts.  We  are 
almost  in  the  very  heart  of  that  "  mob  "  on 
whose  "fellow-feeling  of  vulgarity"  the  fel 
lows  who  grind  the  organ  rely  to  sustain  them 
in  their  outrageous  behavior.  And,  do  you 
know,  as  we  look  out  of  those  windows,  year 
after  year,  we  find  ourselves  growing  to  have  a 
fellow-feeling  of  vulgarity  with  that  same  mob. 


Jersey  and  Mulberry 


The  figure  and  form  which  we  know  best  are 
those  of  old  Judge  Phoenix — for  so  the  office- 
jester  named  him  when  we  first  moved  in,  and 
we  have  known  him  by.  that  name  ever  since. 
He  is  a  fat  old  Irishman,  with  a  clean-shaven 
face,  who  stands  summer  and  winter  in  the 
side  doorway  that  opens,  next  to  the  little 
grocery  opposite,  on  the  alley-way  to  the  rear 
tenement.  Summer  and  winter  he  is  buttoned 
to  his  chin  in  a  faded  old  black  overcoat. 
Alone  he  stands  for  the  most  part,  smoking 
his  black  pipe  and  teetering  gently  from  one 
foot  to  the  other.  But 
sometimes  a  woman  with 
a  shawl  over  her  head  comes 
out  of  the  alley-way  and 
exchanges  a  few  words  with 
him  before  she  goes  to  the 
little  grocery  to  get  a  loaf 
of  bread,  or  a  half- 
pint  of  milk,  or  to 
make  that  favorite 
purchase  of  the  poor 
—  three  potatoes, 
one  t  u  r  n  ip  ,  one 


IO  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

carrot,  four  onions,  and  the  handful  of  kale 
— a  "  b'ilin'."  And  there  is  also  another  old 
man,  a  small  and  bent  old  man,  who  has  some 
strange  job  that  occupies  odd  hours  of  the 
day,  who  stops  on  his  way  to  and  from  work 
to  talk  with  the  Judge.  For  hours  and  hours 
they  talk  together,  till  one  wonders  how  in  the 
course  of  years  they  have  not  come  to  talk 
themselves  out.  What  can  they  have  left  to 
talk  about  ?  If  they  had  been  Mezzofanti  and 
Macaulay,  talking  in  all  known  languages  on 
all  known  topics,  they  ought  certainly  to  have 
exhausted  the  resources  of  conversation  long 
before  this  time. 

Judge  Phoenix  must  be  a  man  of  independ 
ent  fortune,  for  he  toils  not,  neither  docs  he 
spin,  and  the  lilies  of  the  field  could  not  lead  a 
more  simple  vegetable  life,  nor  stay  more 
contentedly  in  one  place.  Perhaps  he  owns 
the  rear  tenement.  I  suspect  so,  for  he  must 
have  been  at  one  time  in  the  labor-contract 
business.  This,  of  course,  is  a  mere  guess, 
founded  upon  the  fact  that  we  once  found  the 
Judge  away  from  his  post  and  at  work.  It 
was  at  the  time  they  were  repaving  Broadway 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  II 

with  the  great  pavement.  We  discovered  the 
Judge  at  the  corner  of  Bleecker  Street  perched 
on  a  pile  of  dirt,  doing  duty  as  sub-section 
boss.  He  was  talking  to  the  drivers  of  the 
vehicles  that  went  past  him,  through  the  half- 
blockaded  thoroughfare,  and  he  was  addressing 
them,  after  the  true  professional  contractor's 
style,  by  the  names  of  their  loads. 

'  Hi  there,  sand,"  he  would  cry,  "  git  along 
lively!  Stone,  it's  you  the  boss  wants  on  the 
other  side  of  the  street !  Dhry-goods,  there's 
no  place  for  ye  here;  take  the  next  turn!" 
It  was  a  proud  day  for  the  old  Judge,  and  I 
have  no  doubt  that  he  talks  it  over  still  with 
his  little  bent  old  crony,  and  boasts  of  vain 
deeds  that  grow  in  the  telling. 

Judge  Phoenix  is  not,  however,  without 
mute  company.  Fair  days  and  foul  are  all  one 
to  the  Judge,  but  on  fair  days  his  companion 
is  brought  out.  In  front  of  the  grocery  is  a 
box  with  a  sloping  top,  on  which  are  little 
bins  for  vegetables.  In  front  of  this  box, 
again,  on  days  when  it  is  not  raining  or  snow 
ing,  a  little  girl  of  five  or  six  comes  out  of  the 
grocery  and  sets  a  little  red  chair.  Then  she 


12 


Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


brings  out  a  smaller  girl  yet,  who  may  be  two 
or  three,  a  plump  and  puggy  little  thing;  and 
E«  clown  in  the  red 

chair  big  sister 
plunks  little  sis 
ter,  and  there 
till  next  meal 
time  little  sister 
sits  and  never  so 
much  as  offers 
to  move.  She 
must  have  been 
trained  to  this 
unchildlike  self- 


r 


imprisonment,  for  she  is  lusty  and  strong 
enough.  Big  sister  works  in  the  shop,  and  once 
in  a  while  she  comes  out  and  settles  little  sister 
more  comfortably  in  her  red  chair;  and  then 
little  sister  has  the  sole  moment  of  relief  from 
a  monotonous  existence.  She  hammers  on 
big  sister's  face  with  her  fat  little  hands,  and 
with  such  skill  and  force  does  she  direct  the 
blows  that  big  sister  often  has  to  wipe  her 
streaming  eyes.  But  big  sister  always  takes  it 
in  good  part,  and  little  sister  evidently  does  it, 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  13 

not  from  any  lack  of  affection,  but  in  the  way 
of  healthy  exercise.  Then  big  sister  wipes 
little  sister's  nose  and  goes  back  into  the  shop. 
I  suppose  there  is  some  compact  between 
them. 

Of  course  there  is  plenty  of  child  life  all  up 
and  down  the  sidewalk  on  both  sides,  although 
little  sister  never  joins  in  it.  My  side  of  the 
street  swarms  with  Italian  children,  most  of 
them  from  Jersey  Street,  which  is  really  not  a 
street,  but  an  alley.  Judge'  Phoenix's  side  is 
peopled  with  small  Germans  and  Irish.  I 
have  noticed  one  peculiar  thing  about  these 
children:  they  never  change  sides.  They  play 
together  most  amicably  in  the  middle  of  the 
street  or  in  the  gutter,  but  neither  ventures 
beyond  its  neutral  ground. 

Judge  Phoenix  and  little  sister  are  by  far 
the  most  interesting  figures  to  be  seen  from 
my  windows,  but  there  are  many  others  whom 
we  know.  There  is  the  Italian  barber  whose 
brother  dropped  dead  while  shaving  a  cus 
tomer.  You  would  never  imagine,  to  see  the 
simple  and  unaffected  way  in  which  he  comes 
out  to  take  the  air  once  in  a  while,  standing;  on 

o 


Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


the  steps  of  his  basement,  and  twirling  his  tin- 
backed  comb  in  idle  thought,  that  he  had  had 
such  a  distinguished  death  in  his  family.  But 
I  don't  let  him  shave  me. 

Then  there  is  Mamie,  the 
pretty  girl  in  the  window  with 
the  lace-curtains,  and  there  is 
her  epileptic  brother.  He  is 
insane,  but  h  a  r  m  1  e  s  s  ,  and 
amusing,  although  rather  try 
ing  to  the  nerves.  He  comes 
out  of  the  house  in  a  hurry, 
walks  quickly  up  the  street 
for  twenty  or  thirty  feet, 
then  turns  suddenly,  as  if  he 
had  forgotten  something,  and  hurries  back,  to 
reappear  two  minutes  later  from  the  basement 
door,  only  to  hasten  wildly  in  another  direc 
tion,  turn  back  again,  plunge  into  the  base 
ment  door,  emerge  from  the  upper  door,  get 
half  way  down  the  block,  forget  it  again,  and 
Co  back  to  make  a  new  combination  of  doors 

o 

and  exits.  Sometimes  he  is  ten  or  twenty 
minutes  in  the  house  at  one  time.  Then  we 
suppose  he  is  having  a  fit.  Now,  it  seems  to 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  1 5 

me  that  that  modest  retirement  shows  con 
sideration  and  thoughtfulness  on  his  part. 

In  the  window  next  to  Mamie's  is  a  little, 
putty-colored  face,  and  a  still  smaller  white 
face,  that  just  peeps  over  the  sill.  One  be 
longs  to  the  mulatto  woman's  youngster. 
Her  mother  goes  out  scrubbing,  and  the  little 
girl  is  alone  all  day.  She  is  so  much  alone, 
that  the  sage-green  old  bachelor  in  the  second 
den  from  mine  could  not  stand  it,  last  Christ 
mas  time,  so  he  sent  her  a  doll  on  the  sly. 
That's  the  other  face. 

Then  there  is  the  grocer,  who  is  a  groceress, 
and  the  groceress's  husband.  I  wish  that  man 
to  understand,  if  his  eye  ever  falls  upon  this 
page — for  wrapping  purposes,  we  will  say — 
that,  in  the  language  of  Mulberry  Street,  I  am 
on  to  him.  He  has  got  a  job  recently,  driving 
a  bakery  wagon,  and  he  times  his  route  so  that 
he  can  tie  up  in  front  of  his  wife's  grocery 
every  day  at  twelve  o'clock,  and  he  puts  in  a 
solid  hour  of  his  employer's  time  helping  his 
wife  through  the  noonday  rush.  But  he  need 
not  fear.  In  the  interests  of  the  higher  moral 
ity  I  suppose  I  ought  to  go  and  tell  his  em- 


1 6  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

ployer  about  it.      But  I  won't.     My  morals  are 
not  that  high. 

Of  course  we  have  many  across-the-street 
friends,  but  I  cannot  tell  you  of  them  all.  I 
will  only  mention  the  plump  widow  who  keeps 
the  lunch-room  and  bakery  on  the  Houston 
Street  corner,  where  the  boys  go  for  their 
luncheon.  It  is  through  her  that  many  inter 
esting  details  of  personal  gossip  find  their  way 
into  this  office. 

Jersey  Street,  or  at  least  the  rear  of  it, 
seems  to  be  given  up  wholly  to  the  Italians. 
The  most  charming  tenant 
of  Jersey  Street  is  the 
lovely  Italian  girl,  who 
looks  like  a  Jewess,  whose 
mission  in  life  seems  to  be 
!^^^  to  hang  all  day  long  out 
of  her  window  and  watch 
the  doings  in  the  little 
stone-flagged  courts  below 
her.  In  one  of  these  an 
old  man  sometimes  comes  out,  sits  him  down 
in  a  shady  corner,  and  plays  on  the  Italian  bag 
pipes,  which  are  really  more  painful  than  any 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  17 

hand-organ  that  ever  was  made.  After  a 
while  his  wife  opens  hostilities  with  him  from 
her  window.  I  suppose  she  is  reproaching 
him  for  an  idle  devotion  to  art,  but  I  cannot 
follow  the  conversation,  although  it  is  quite 
loud  enough  on  both  sides.  But  the  hand 
some  Italian  girl  up  at  the  window  follows  the 
changes  of  the  strife  with  the  light  of  the  joy 
of  battle  in  her  beautiful  dark  eyes,  and  I  can 
tell  from  her  face  exactly  which  of  the  old 
folk  is  getting  the  better  of  it. 

But  though  the  life  of  Jersey  and  Mulberry 
Streets  may  be  mildly  interesting  to  outside 
spectators  who  happen  to  have  a  fellow-feeling 
of  vulgarity  with  the  mob,  the  mob  must  find 
it  rather  monotonous.  Jersey  Street  is  not 
only  a  blind  alley,  but  a  dead  one,  so  far  as 
outside  life  is  concerned,  and  Judge  Phoenix 
and  little  sister  see  pretty  much  the  same  old 
two-and-sixpence  every  day.  The  bustle  and 
clamor  of  Mulberry  Bend  are  only  a  few  blocks 
below  them,  but  the  Bend  is  an  exclusive 
slum ;  and  Police  Headquarters — the  Central 
Office — is  a  block  above,  but  the  Central  Office 
deals  only  with  the  refinements  of  artistic 


1 8  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

crime,  and  is  not  half  so  interesting  as  an  ordi 
nary  police  station.  The  priests  go  by  from 
the  school  below,  in  their  black  robes  and  tall 
silk  hats,  always  two  by  two,  marching  with 
brisk,  business-like  tread.  An  occasional 
drunken  man  or  woman  wavers  alon^,  but 

o " 

generally  their  faces  and  their  conditions  are 
both  familiar.  Sometimes  two  men  hurry  by, 
pressing  side  by  side.  If  you  have  seen  that 
peculiar  walk  before  you  know  what  it  means. 
Two  light  steel  rings  link  their  wrists  together. 
The  old  man  idly  watches  them  until  they 
disappear  in  the  white  marble  building  on 
the  next  block.  And  then,  of  course,  there  is 
always  a  thin  stream  of  working  folk  going  to 
and  fro  upon  their  business. 

In  spring  and  in  fall  things  brighten  a  little. 
Those  are  the  seasons  of  processions  and  relig 
ious  festivals.  Almost  every  day  then,  and 
sometimes  half  a  dozen  times  in  a  day,  the 
Judge  and  the  baby  may  see  some  Italian 
society  parading  through  the  street.  Four 
teen  proud  sons  of  Italy,  clad  in  magnificent 
new  uniforms,  bearing  aloft  huge  silk  banners, 
strut  magnificently  in  the  rear  of  a  German 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  19 

band  of  twenty-four  pieces,  and  a  drum-corps 
of  a  dozen  more.  Then,  too,  come  the  relig 
ious  processions,  when  the  little  girls  are  taken 
to  their  first  communion.  Six  sturdy  Italians 
struggle  along  under  the  weight  of  a  mighty 
temple  or  pavilion,  all  made  of  colored  candles 
—not  the  dainty  little  pink  trifles  with  rosy 
shades  of  perforated  paper,  that  light  our  old 
lady's  dining-table — but  the  great  big  candles 
of  the  Romish  Church  (a  church  which,  you 
may  remember,  is  much  affected  of  the  mob, 
especially  in  times  of  suffering,  sickness,  or 
death) ;  mighty  candles,  six  and  eight  feet  tall, 
and  as  thick  as  your  wrist,  of  red  and  blue  and 
green  and  yellow,  arranged  in  artistic  combina 
tions  around  a  statue  of  the  Virgin.  From  this 
splendid  structure  silken  ribbons  stream  in  all 
directions,  and  at  the  end  of  each  ribbon  is  a 
little  girl — generally  a  pretty  little  girl — in  a 
white  dress  bedecked  with  green  bows.  And 
each  little  girl  leads  by  the  hand  one  smaller 
than  herself,  sometimes  a  toddler  so  tiny  that 
you  marvel  that  it  can  walk  at  all.  Some  of 
the  little  ones  are  bare-headed,  but  most  of 
them  wear  the  square  head-cloth  of  the  Italian 


20 


Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


peasant,  such  as  their  mothers  and  grand 
mothers  wore  in  Italy.  At  each  side  of  the 
girls  marches  an  escort  of  proud  parents,  very 
much  mixed  up  with  the  boys  of  the  families, 
who  generally  appear  in  their  usual  street 
dress,  some  of  them  showing  through  it  in 

conspicuous  places. 
And  before  and  be 
hind  them  arc  bands 
and  drum-corps,  and 
societies  with  ban 
ners,  and  it  is  all  a 
blare  of  martial  mu 
sic  and  primary  col 
ors  the  whole  length 
of  the  street. 

But  these  arc  Mul 
berry  Street's  brief 
carnival  seasons,  and 
when  their  splendor  is  departed  the  block  re 
lapses  into  workaday  dulness,  and  the  proces 
sion  that  marches  and  counter-marches  before 
Judge  Phoenix  and  little  sister  in  any  one  of 
the  long  hours  between  eight  and  twelve  and 
one  and  six  is  something  like  this: 


Jersey  and  Mulberry 


21 


UP. 

Detective  taking 
prisoner  to 
Central  Office. 

Messenger  boy. 

Two  priests. 

Jewish  sweater, 
with  coats  on 
his  shoulder. 

Carpenter. 

Another  China 
man. 

Drunken  woman 
(a  regular). 

Glass-put-in 
man. 


DOWN. 


Chinaman. 
Two    house- 

painters. 
Boy  with  basket. 
Boy  with   tin 

beer-pails  on  a 

stick. 


UP. 

Wash  e  r  wo 
rn  a  n  with 
clothes. 

Poor  woman 
with  market- 
basket. 

Undertaker's 
man  carry 
ing  trestles. 

Butcher's  boy. 

Two  priests. 


DOWN. 


Drunken  man. 


Detective 
coming  back 
from  Cen 
tral  Office 
alone. 


22  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

Such  is  the  daily  march  of  the  mob  in  Mul 
berry  Street  near  the  mouth  of  Jersey's  blind 
alley,  and  such  is  its  outrageous  behavior  as 
observed  by  a  presumably  decent  person  from 
the  windows  of  the  big  red-brick  building 
across  the  way. 

Suddenly  there  is  an  explosion  of  sound 
under  the  decent  person's  window,  and  a 
hand-organ  starts  off  with  a  jerk  like  a  freight 
train  on  a  down  grade,  that  joggles  a  whole 
string  of  crashing  notes.  Then  it  gets  down 
to  work,  and  its  harsh,  high-pitched,  metallic 
drone  makes  the  street  ring  for  a  moment. 
Then  it  is  temporarily  drowned  by  a  chorus  of 
shrill,  small  voices.  The  person — I  am  afraid 
his  decency  begins  to  drop  off  him  here — leans 
on  his  broad  window-sill  and  looks  out.  The 
street  is  filled  with  children  of  every  age,  size, 
and  nationality;  dirty  children,  clean  children, 
well-dressed  children,  and  children  in  rags, 
and  for  every  one  of  these  last  two  classes  put 
together  a  dozen  children  who  are  neatly  and 
cleanly  but  humbly  clad- — the  children  of  the 
self-respecting  poor.  I  do  not  know  where 
they  have  all  swarmed  from.  There  were  only 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  23 

three  or  four  in  sight  just  before  the  organ 
came;  now  there  are  several  dozen  in  the 
crowd,  and  the  crowd  is  growing.  See,  the 
women  are  coming  out  in  the  rear  tenements. 
Some  male  passers-by  line  up  on  the  edge  of 
the  sidewalk  and  look  on  with  a  superior  air. 
The  Italian  barber  has  come  all  the  way  up 
his  steps,  and  is  sitting  on  the  rail.  Judge 
Phoenix  has  teetered  forward  at  least  half  a 
yard,  and  stands  looking  at  the  show  over  the 
heads  of  a  little  knot  of  women  hooded  with 
red  plaid  shawls.  The  epileptic  boy  comes 
out  on  his  stoop  and  stays  there  at  least  three 
minutes  before  the  area-way  swallows  him. 
Up  above  there  is  a  head  in  almost  every  case 
ment.  Mamie  is  at  her  window,  and  the  little 
mulatto  child  at  hers.  There  are  only  two 
people  who  do  not  stop  and  look  on  and 
listen.  One  is  a  Chinaman,  who  stalks  on 
with  no  expression  at  all  on  his  blank  face; 
the  other  is  the  boy  from  the  printing-office 
with  a  dozen  foaming  cans  of  beer  on  his  long 
stick.  But  he  does  not  leave  because  he  wants 
to.  He  lingers  as  long  as  he  can,  in  his  pass 
age  through  the  throng,  and  disappears  in  the 


24  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


printing-house  doorway  with  his  head  screwed 
half  way  around  on  his  shoulders.  He  would 
linger  yet,  but  the  big  foreman  would  call  him 

"  Spi  tz  b  u  b  e  !  " 
and  would  cuff 
his  ears. 

The  children 
arc  dancing.  The 
organ  is  playing 
"On  the  Blue 
Alsatian  Moun 
tains,"  and  the 
little  heads  are 
bobbing  up  and 
down  to  it  in  time 
as  true  as  ever  was  kept.  Watch  the  little 
things!  They  are  really  waltzing.  There  is 
a  young  one  of  four  years  old.  See  her 
little  worn  shoes  take  the  step  and  keep  it ! 
Dodworth  or  DeGarmo  could  not  have  taught 
her  better.  I  wonder  if  either  of  them  ever 
had  so  young  a  pupil.  And  she  is  dancing 
with  a  girl  twice  her  size.  Look  at  that  ring 
of  children — all  girls — waltzing  round  hand  in 
hand!  How  is  that  for  a  ladies'  chain  ?  Well, 


THE   CHILDREN    ARE    DANCING.         THE    ORGAN    IS    PLAYING    "  ON   THE 
BLUE    ALSATIAN    MOUNTAINS  " 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  27 

well,  the  heart  grows  young  to  see  them. 
And  now  look  over  to  the  grocery.  Big  sister 
has  come  out  and  climbed  on  the  vegetable- 
stand,  and  is  sitting  in  the  potatoes  with  little 
sister  in  her  lap.  Little  sister  waves  her  fat, 
red  arms  in  the  air  and  shrieks  in  babyish 
delight.  The  old  women  with  the  shawls  over 
their  heads  are  talking  together,  crooning  over 
the  spectacle  in  their  Irish  way : 

'  Thot's  me  Mary  Ann,  I  was  tcllin'  ye 
about,  Mrs.  Rafferty,  dancin'  wid  the  little 
one  in  the  green  apron." 

'  It's  a  foine  sthring  o'  childher  ye  have, 
Mrs.  Finn!"  says  Mrs.  Rafferty,  nodding  her 
head  as  though  it  were  balanced  on  wires. 
And  so  the  dance  goes  on. 

In  the  centre  of  it  all  stands  the  organ- 
grinder,  swarthy  and  black-haired.  He  has  a 
small,  clear  space  so  that  he  can  move  the  one 
leg  of  his  organ  about,  as  he  turns  from  side 
to  side,  gazing  up  at  the  windows  of  the  brick 
building  where  the  great  wrought-iron  griffins 
stare  back  at  him  from  their  lofty  perches. 
His  anxious  black  eyes  rove  from  window  to 
window.  The  poor  he  has  always  with  him, 


28  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

but  what  will  the  folk  who  mould  public 
opinion  in  great  griffin-decorated  buildings  do 
for  him  ? 

I  think  we  will  throw  him  clown  a  few 
nickels.  Let  us  tear  off  a  scrap  of  newspaper. 
Here  is  a  bit  from  the  society  column  of  the 
Everting—  — .  That  will  do  excellently  well. 
We  will  screw  the  money  up  in  that,  and 
there  it  goes,  chink  !  on  the  pavement  below. 
There,  look  at  that  grin!  Wasn't  it  cheap  at 
the  price  ? 

I  wish  he  might  have  had  a  monkey  to  come 
up  and  get  the  nickels.  We  shall  never  see 
the  organ-grinder's  monkey  in  the  streets  of 
New  York  aerain.  I  see  him,  though.  He 

o  o 

comes  out  and  visits  me  where  I  live  among 
the  trees,  whenever  the  weather  is  not  too 
cold  to  permit  him  to  travel  with  his  master. 
Sometimes  he  comes  in  a  bag,  on  chilly  days; 
and  my  own  babies,  who  seem  to  be  born  with 
the  fellow-feeling  of  vulgarity  with  the  mob, 
invite  him  in  and  show  him  how  to  warm  his 
cold  little  black  hands  in  front  of  the  kitchen 
range. 

I  do  not  suppose,  even  if  it  were  possible  to 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  29 

get  our  good  old  maiden  lady  to  come  down 
to  Mulberry  Street  and  sit  at  my  window  when 
the  organ-grinder  comes  along,  she  could  ever 
learn  to  look  at  the  mob  with  friendly,  or  at 
least  kindly,  eyes;  but  I  think  she  would  learn 
— and  she  is  cordially  invited  to  come — -that  it 
is  not  a  mob  that  rejoices  in  "  outrageous  be 
havior,"  as  some  other  mobs  that  we  read  of 
have  rejoiced — notably  one  that  gave  a  great 
deal  of  trouble  to  some  very  "  decent  people  " 
in  Paris  toward  the  end  of  the  last  century. 
And  I  think  that  she  even  might  be  induced  to 
see  that  the  organ-grinder  is  following  an  hon 
est  trade,  pitiful  as  it  be,  and  not  exercising 
a"  fearful  beggary."  He  cannot  be  called  a 
beggar  who  gives  something  that  to  him,  and 
to  thousands  of  others,  is  something  valuable, 
in  return  for  the  money  he  asks  of  you.  Our 
organ-grinder  is  no  more  a  beggar  than  is  my 
good  friend  Mr.  Henry  Abbey,  the  honestest 
and  best  of  operatic  impresarios.  Mr.  Abbey 
can  take  the  American  opera  house  and  hire 
Mr.  Seidl  and  Mr.  -  -  to  conduct  grand  opera 
for  your  delight  and  mine,  and  when  we  can 
afford  it  we  go  and  listen  to  his  perfect  music, 


3O  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

and,  as  our  poor  contributions  cannot  pay  for 
it  all,  the  rich  of  the  land  meet  the  deficit. 
But  this  poor,  foot-sore  child  of  fortune  has 
only  his  heavy  box  of  tunes  and  a  human 
being's  easement  in  the  public  highway.  Let 
us  not  shut  him  out  of  that  poor  right  because 
once  in  a  while  he  wanders  in  front  of  our 
doors  and  offers  wares  that  offend  our  finer 
taste.  It  is  easy  enough  to  get  him  to  betake 
himself  elsewhere,  and,  if  it  costs  us  a  few 
cents,  let  us  not  ransack  our  law-books  and 
our  moral  philosophies  to  find  out  if  we  cannot 
indict  him  for  constructive  blackmail,  but  con 
sider  the  nickel  or  the  dime  a  little  tribute  to 
the  uncounted  weary  souls  who  love  his  strains 
and  welcome  his  coming. 

For  the  editor  of  the  Evening  -  -  was 
wrong  when  he  said  that  the  Board  of  Alder 
men  and  the  Mayor  consented  to  the  licensing 
of  the  organ-grinder  "  in  the  face  of  a  popular 
protest."  There  was  a  protest,  but  it  was  not 
a  popular  protest,  and  it  came  face  to  face 
with  a  demand  that  was  popular.  And  the 
Mayor  and  the  Board  of  Aldermen  did  rightly, 
and  did  as  should  be  done  in  this  American 


Jersey  and  Mulberry  31 

land  of  ours,  when  they  granted  the  demand 
of  the  majority  of  the  people,  and  refused  to 
heed  the  protest  of  a  minority.  For  the 
people  who  said  YEA  on  this  question  were  as 
scores  of  thousands  or  hundreds  of  thousands 
to  the  thousands  of  people  who  said  NAY ;  and 
the  vexation  of  the  few  hangs  light  in  the 
balance  against  even  the  poor  scrap  of  joy 
which  was  spared  to  innumerable  barren  lives. 
And  so  permit  me  to  renew  my  invitation 
to  the  old  lady. 


TIEMANN'S   TO   TUBBY    HOOK 


TIEMANN'S  TO  TUBBY   HOOK 

IF  you  ever  were  a  decent,  healthy  boy,  or 
if  you  can  make  believe  that  you  once 
were  such  a  boy,  you  must  remember  that  you 
were  once  in  love  with  a  girl  a  great  deal  older 
than  yourself.  I  am  not  speaking  of  the  big 
school-girl  with  whom  you  thought  you  were 
in  love,  for  one  little  while — just  because  she 
wouldn't  look  at  you,  and  treated  you  like  a 
little  boy.  She  had,  after  all,  but  a  tuppenny 
temporary  superiority  to  you  ;  and,  after  all, 
in  the  bottom  of  your  irritated  little  soul,  you 
knew  it.  You  knew  that,  proud  beauty  that 
she  was,  she  might  have  to  lower  her  colors  to 
her  little  sister  before  that  young  minx  got 
into  the  first  class  and — comparatively — long 
dresses. 

No,  I  am  talking  of  the  girl  you  loved  who 


Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


was  not  only  really  grown  up  and  too  old  for 
you,  but  grown  up  almost  into  old-maid- 
hood,  and  too  old  perhaps  for  anyone.  She 
was  not,  of  course,  quite  an  old  maid,  but  she 
was  so  nearly  an  old  maid  as  to  be  out  of  all 
active  competition  with  her  juniors — which 

permitted   her  to 
-feL  "l^k     V:    be     her    natural, 

^^^^y         **  ' 

V  itl!      simPle    sclf>     and 

f*  \\  to  show  you  the 
real  charm  of  her 
womanhood. 
Neglected  by  the 
men,  not  yet  old 

enough  to  take  to  coddling  young  girls  after 
the  manner  of  motherly  old  maids,  she  found 
a  hearty  and  genuine  pleasure  in  your  boyish 
friendship,  and  you — you  adored  her.  You 
saw,  of  course,  as  others  saw,  the  faded  dul- 
ness  of  her  complexion;  you  saw  the  wee 
crow's-feet  that  gathered  in  the  corners  of  her 
eyes  when  she  laughed ;  you  saw  the  faint 
touches  of  white  among  the  crisp  little  curls 
over  her  temples;  you  saw  that  the  keenest 
wind  of  Fall  brought  the  red  to  her  cheeks 


Tiemanris  to   Tubby  Hook  37 

only  in  two  bright  spots,  and  that  no  soft 
Spring  air  would  ever  bring  her  back  the  rosy, 
pink  flush  of  girlhood  :  you  saw  these  things 
as  others  saw  them — no,  indeed,  you  did  not ; 
you  saw  them  as  others  could  not,  and  they 
only  made  her  the  more  dear  to  you.  And 
you  were  having  one  of  the  best  and  most 
valuable  experiences  of  your  boyhood,  to 
which  you  may  look  back  now,  whatever  life 
has  brought  you,  with  a  smile  that  has  in  it 
nothing  of  regret,  of  derision,  or  of  bitterness. 
Suppose  that  this  all  happened  long  ago— 
that  you  had  left  a  couple  of  quarter-posts  of 
your  course  of  three-score-years-and-ten  be 
tween  that  young  lover  and  your  present  self; 
and  suppose  that  the  idea  came  to  you  to  seek 
out  and  revisit  this  dear  faded  memory.  And 
suppose  that  you  were  foolish  enough  to  act 
upon  the  idea,  and  went  in  search  of  her  and 
found  her — not  the  wholesome,  autumn- 
nipped  comrade  that  you  remembered,  a 
shade  or  two  at  most  frostily  touched  by  the 
winter  of  old  age — but  a  berouged,  beraddled, 
bedizened  old  make-believe,  with  wrinkles 
plastered  thick,  and  skinny  shoulders  dusted 


38  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

white  with  powder — ah  me,  how  you  would 
wish  you  had  not  gone ! 

And  just  so  I  wished  that  I  had  not  gone, 
when,  the  other  day,  I  was  tempted  back  to 
revisit  the  best  beloved  of  all  the  homes  of 
my  nomadic  boyhood. 

I  remembered  four  pleasant  years  of  early 
youth  when  my  lot  was  cast  in  a  region  that 
was  singularly  delightful  and  grateful  and  lov 
able,  although  the  finger  of  death  had  already 
touched  its  prosperity  and  beauty  beyond  all 
requickening. 

It  was  a  fair  countryside  of  upland  and 
plateau,  lying  between  a  majestic  hill-bordered 
river  and  an  idle,  wandering,  marshy,  salt 
creek  that  flowed  almost  side  by  side  with  its 
nobler  companion  for  several  miles  before  they 
came  together  at  the  base  of  a  steep,  rocky 
height,  crowned  with  thick  woods.  This 
whole  country  was  my  playground,  a  strip 
some  four  or  five  miles  long,  and  for  the  most 
of  the  way  a  mile  wide  between  the  two  rivers, 
with  the  rocky,  wooded  eminence  for  its 
northern  boundary. 

In  the  days  when   the  broad   road  that  led 


Tiemanns  to   Tubby  Hook  39 

from  the  great  city  was  a  famous  highway,  it 
had  run  through  a  country  of  comfortable 
farm-houses  and  substantial  old-fashioned 
mansions  standing  in  spacious  grounds  of 
woodland  and  meadow.  These  latter  occu 
pied  the  heights  along  the  great  river,  like  a 
lofty  breastwork  of  aristocracy,  guarding  the 
humbler  tillers  of  the  soil  in  the  more  sheltered 
plains  and  hollows  behind  them.  The  extreme 
north  of  my  playground  had  been,  within  my 
father's  easy  remembering,  a  woodland  wild 
enough  to  shelter  deer ;  and  even  in  my  boy 
hood  there  remained  patches  of  forest  where 
once  in  a  while  the  sharp-eyed  picked  up  gun- 
flints  and  brass  buttons  that  had  been  dropped 
among  those  very  trees  by  the  marauding  sol 
diery  of  King  George  III.  of  tyrannical  mem 
ory.  There  was  no  deer  there  when  I  was  a 
boy.  Deer  go  naturally  with  a  hardy  peasantry, 
and  not  naturally,  perhaps,  but  artificially,  with 
the  rich  and  great.  But  deer  cannot  coexist 
with  a  population  composed  of  what  we  call 
'  People  of  Moderate  Means."  It  is  not  in 
the  eternal  fitness  of  things  that  they  should. 
For,  as  I  first  knew  our  neighborhood,  it 


40  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

was  a  suburb  as  a  physical  fact  only.  As  a 
body  politic,  we  were  a  part  of  the  great  city, 
and  those  twain  demons  of  encroachment, 


Taxes  and  Assessments,  had  definitively  won 
in  their  battle  with  both  the  farmers  and  the 
country-house  gentry.  To  the  south,  the 
farms  had  been  wholly  routed  out  of  existence. 
A  few  of  the  old  family  estates  were  kept  up 


Tiemanris  to  Tubby  Hook  41 

after  a  fashion,  but  it  was  only  as  the  officers 
of  a  defeated  garrison  are  allowed  to  take  their 
own  time  about  leaving  their  quarters.  Along 
the  broad  highway  some  of  them  lingered, 
keeping  up  a  poor  pretence  of  disregarding 
new  grades  and  levels,  and  of  not  seeing  the 
little  shanties  that  squatted  under  their  very 
windows,  or  the  more  offensive  habitations  of 
a  more  pretentious  poverty  that  began  to  range 
themselves  here  and  there  in  serried  blocks. 
Poor  people  of  moderate  means!  Nobody 
wants  you,  except  the  real  estate  speculator, 
and  he  wants  you  only  to  empty  your  light 
pockets  for  you,  and  to  leave  you  to  die  of  cheap 
plumbing  in  the  poor  little  sham  of  a  house 
that  he  builds  to  suit  your  moderate  means 
and  his  immoderate  greed.  Nowhere  are  you 
welcome,  except  where  contractors  are  digging 
new  roads  and  blasting 
rocks  and  filling  sunken 
lots  with  ashes  and  tin 
cans.  The  random  goat 
of  poverty  browses  on 
the  very  confines  of  the 
scanty,  small  settlement 


42  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

of  cheap  gentility  where  you  and  your  neigh 
bors — people  of  moderate  means  like  yourself 
—huddle  together  in  your  endless,  unceasing 
struggle  for  a  home  and  self-respect.  You 
know  that  your  smug,  mean  little  house, 
tricked  out  with  machine-made  scroll-work, 
and  insufficiently  clad  in  two  coats  of  ready- 
mixed  paint,  is  an  eyesore  to  the  poor  old 
gentleman  who  has  sold  you  a  corner  of  his 
father's  estate  to  build  it  on.  But  there  it 
is — the  whole  hard  business  of  life  for  the 
poor — for  the  big  poor  and  the  little  poor, 
and  the  unhappiest  of  all,  the  moderately 
poor.  He  must  sell  strip  after  strip  of  the 
grounds  his  father  laid  out  with  such  loving 
and  far-looking  pride.  You  must  buy  your 
narrow  strip  from  him,  and  raise  thereon  your 
tawdry  little  house,  calculating  the  cost  of 
every  inch  of  construction  in  hungry  anxiety 
of  mind.  And  then  you  must  sit  clown  in 
your  narrow  front-room  to  stare  at  the  squalid 
shanty  of  the  poor  man  who  has  squatted  right 
in  your  sight,  on  the  land  condemned  for  the 
new  avenue;  to  wish  that  the  street  might  be 
cut  through  and  the  unsightly  hovel  taken 


Tiemann  s  to   Tubby  Hook  43 

away — and  then  to  groan  in  spirit  as  you 
think  of  the  assessment  you  must  pay  when 
the  street  is  cut  through. 

And  yet  you  must  live,  oh,  people  of  mod 
erate  means!  You  have  your  loves  and  your 
cares,  your  tastes  and  your  ambitions,  your 
hopes  and  your  fears,  your  griefs  and  your 
joys,  just  like  the  people  whom  you  envy  and 
the  people  who  envy  you.  As  much  as  any 
of  them,  you  have  the  capacity  for  pain  and 
for  pleasure,  for  loving  and  for  being  loved, 
that  gives  human  beings  a  right  to  turn  the 
leaves  of  the  book  of  life  and  spell  out  its  les 
son  for  themselves.  I  know  this ;  I  know  it 
well ;  I  was  beginning  to  find  it  out  when  I 
first  came  to  that  outpost  suburb  of  New 
York,  in  the  trail  of  your  weary  army. 

But  I  was  a  boy  then,  and  no  moderateness 
of  earthly  means  could  rob  me  of  my  inheri 
tance  in  the  sky  and  the  woods  and  the  fields, 
in  the  sun  and  the  snow  and  the  rain  and  the 
wind,  and  in  every  day's  weather,  of  which 
there  never  was  any  kind  made  that  has  not 
some  delight  in  it  to  a  healthful  body  and 
heart.  And  on  this  inheritance  I  drew  such 


44  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

great,  big,  liberal,  whacking  drafts  that,  I 
declare,  to  this  very  day,  some  odd  silver 
pieces  of  the  resultant  spending-money  keep 
turning  up,  now  and  then,  in  forgotten  pockets 
of  my  mind. 

The  field  of  my  boyish  activity  was  practi 
cally  limited  by  the  existing  conditions  of  the 
city's  growth.  With  each  year  there  was  less 
and  less  temptation  to  extend  that  field  south 
ward.  The  Bloomingdale  Road,  with  its  great 
arching  willows,  its  hospitable  old  road-houses 
withdrawn  from  the  street  and  hidden  far 
down  shady  lanes  that  led  riverward — the 
splendid  old  highway  retained  something  of 
its  charm ;  but  day  by  day  the  gridiron  system 
of  streets  encroached  upon  it,  and  day  by  day 
the  shanties  and  the  cheap  villas  crowded  in 
along  its  sides,  between  the  old  farmsteads  and 
the  country-places.  And  then  it  led  only  to 
the  raw  and  unfinished  Central  Park,  and  to 
the  bare  waste  and  dreary  fag-end  of  a  New 
York  that  still  looked  upon  Union  Square  as 
an  uptown  quarter.  Besides  that,  the  lone 
scion  of  respectability  who  wandered  too  freely 
about  the  region  just  below  Manhattanville, 


Tiemanris  to   Tubby  Hook  45 

was  apt  to  get  his  head  most  beautifully 
punched  at  the  hands  of  some  predatory  gang 
of  embryonic  toughs  from  the  shanties  on  the 
line  of  the  aqueduct. 

That  is  how  our  range — mine  and  the  other 
boys' — Was  from  Tiemann's  to  Tubby  Hook; 
that  is,  from  where  ex-Mayor  Tiemann's  fine 
old  house,  with  its  long  conservatories,  sat  on 
the  edge  of  the  Manhattanville  bluff  and  looked 
down  into  the  black  mouths  of  the  chimneys 
of  the  paint-works  that  had  paid  for  its  build 
ing,  up  to  the  little  inn  near  the  junction  of 


Spuyten  Duyvil  Creek  and  the  Hudson  River. 
Occasionally,  of  course,  the  delight  of  the  river 
front  tempted  us  farther  down.  There  was  an 
iron-mill  down  there  (if  that  is  the  proper 
name  for  a  place  where  they  make  pig-iron), 
whose  operations  were  a  perpetual  joy  to  boy- 


46  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

hood's  heart.  The  benevolent  lovers  of  the 
picturesque  who  owned  this  mill  had  a  most 
entrancing  way  of  making  their  castings  late 
in  the  afternoon,  so  as  to  give  a  boy  a  chance 
to  coast  or  skate,  an  hour  after  school  closed, 
before  it  was  time  to  slip  down  to  the  grimy 
building  on  the  river's  bank,  and  peer  through 
the  arched  doorway  into  the  great,  dark,  mys 
terious  cavern  with  its  floor  of  sand  marked 
out  in  a  pattern  of  trenches  that  looked  as  if 
they  had  been  made  by  some  gigantic  double- 
toothed  comb — a  sort  of  right-angled  herring 
bone  pattern.  The  darkness  gathered  outside, 
and  deepened  still  faster  within  that  gloomy, 
smoke-blackened  hollow.  The  workmen,  with 
long  iron  rods  in  their  hands,  moved  about 
with  the  cautious,  expectant  manner  of  men 
whose  duty  brings  them  in  contact  with  a  daily 
danger.  They  stepped  carefully  about,  fear 
ful  of  injuring  the  regular  impressions  in  the 
smooth  sand,  and  their  looks  turned  ever  with 
a  certain  anxiety  to  the  great  black  furnace  at 
the  northern  end  of  the  room,  where  every 
now  and  then,  at  the  foreman's  order,  a  fiery 
eye  would  open  itself  for  inspection  and  close 


Tiemanns  to   Tubby  Hook  47 

sullenly,  making  everything  seem  more  dark 
than  it  was  before.  At  last — sometimes  it 
was  long  to  wait — the  eye  would  open,  and 
the  foreman,  looking  into  it,  would  nod;  and 
then  a  thrill  of  excitement  ran  through  the 
workmen  at  their  stations  and  the  boys  in  the 
big  doorway;  and  suddenly  a  huge  red  mouth 
opened  beneath  the  eye,  and  out  poured  the 
mighty  flood  of  molten  iron,  glowing  with  a 
terrible,  wonderful,  dazzling  color  that  was 
neither  white  nor  red,  nor  rose  nor  yellow,  but 
that  seemed  to  partake  of  them  all,  and  yet  to 
be  strangely  different  from  any  hue  that  men 
can  classify  or  name.  Down  it  flowed  upon 
the  sanded  floor,  first  into  the  broad  trench  in 
front  of  the  furnace,  then  down  the  long  dor 
sals  of  the  rectangular  herring-bones,  spread 
ing  out  as  it  went  into  the  depressions  to  right 
and  left,  until  the  mighty  pattern  of  fire  shone 
in  its  full  length  and  breadth  on  the  flood  of 
sand;  and  the  workmen,  who  had  been  coax 
ing  the  sluggish,  lava-like  flood  along  with 
their  iron  rods,  rested  from  their  labors  and 
wiped  their  hot  brows,  while  a  thin  cloud  of 
steamy  vapor  floated  up  to  the  begrimed 


48  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

rafters.  Standing  in  the  doorway  we  could 
watch  the  familiar  pattern — the  sow  and  pigs, 
it  was  called — die  down  to  a  dull  rose  red,  and 
then  we  would  hurry  away  before  blackness 
came  upon  it  and  wiped  it  clean  out  of  mem 
ory  and  imagination. 

Below  the  foundry,  too,  there  was  a  point 
of  land  whereon  were  certain  elevations  and 
depressions  of  turf-covered  earth  that  were  by 
many,  and  most  certainly  by  me,  supposed  to 
be  the  ruins  of  a  Revolutionary  fort.  I  have 
heard  long  and  warm  discussions  of  the  nature 
and  history  of  these  mounds  and  trenches,  and 
I  believe  the  weight  of  authority  was  against 
the  theory  that  they  were  earthworks  thrown 
up  to  oppose  the  passage  of  a  British  fleet. 
But  they  were  good  enough  earthworks  for  a 
boy. 

Just  above  Tiemann's,  on  the  lofty,  protru- 
dent  corner  made  by  the  dropping  of  the  high 
road  into  the  curious  transverse  valley,  or 
swale,  which  at  I25th  Street  crosses  Manhat 
tan  Island  from  east  to  west,  stood,  at  the  top 
of  a  steep  lawn,  a  mansion  imposing  still  in 
spite  of  age,  decay,  and  sorry  days.  The 


Ticmanri s  to   Tubby  Hook 


49 


great  Ionic  columns  of  the  portico,  which 
stood  the  whole  height  and  breadth  of  the 
front,  were  cracked  in  their  length,  and  rotten 
in  base  and  capital.  The 
white  and  yellow  paint  was 
faded  and  blistered.  Be 
low  the  broad  flight 
of  crazy  front-steps 
the  grass  grew  rank 
in  the  gravel  walk, 
and  died  out  inbrown, 
withered  patches  on 
the  lawn,  where  only 
plantain  and  sorrel 
throve.  It  was  a  sad 
and  shabby  old  house  enough,  but  even  the 
patches  of  newspaper  here  and  there  on  its 
broken  window-panes  could  not  take  away  a 
certain  simple,  old-fashioned  dignity  from  its 
weather-beaten  face. 

Here,  the  boys  used  to  say,  the  Crazy 
Woman  lived ;  but  she  was  not  crazy.  I 
knew  the  old  lady  well,  and  at  one  time  we 
were  very  good  friends.  She  was  the  last 
daughter  of  an  old,  once  prosperous  family;  a 

4 


50  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

woman  of  bright,  even  brilliant  mind,  un 
hinged  by  misfortune,  disappointment,  loneli 
ness,  and  the  horrible  fascination  which  an 
inherited  load  of  litigation  exercised  upon  her. 
The  one  diversion  of  her  declining  years  was 
to  let  various  parts  and  portions  of  her 
premises,  on  any  ridiculous  terms  that  might 
suggest  themselves,  to  any  tenants  that  might 
offer;  and  then  to  eject  the  lessee,  either  on  a 
nice  point  of  law  or  on  general  principles,  pre 
cisely  as  she  saw  fit.  She  was  almost  invari 
ably  successful  in  this  curious  game,  and  when 
she  was  not,  she  promptly  made  friends  with 
her  victorious  tenant,  and  he  usually  ended  by 
liking  her  very  much. 

Her  family,  if  I  remember  rightly,  had  dis 
tinguished  itself  in  public  service.  It  was  one 
of  those  good  old  American  houses  where  the 
men-children  are  born  with  politics  in  their 
veins — that  is,  with  an  inherited  sense  of  citi 
zenship,  and  a  conscious  pride  in  bearing  their 
share  in  the  civic  burden.  The  young  man 
just  out  of  college,  who  has  got  a  job  at  writ 
ing  editorials  on  the  Purification  of  Politics,  is 
very  fond  of  alluding  to  such  men  as  "  indu- 


Tie man ns  to   Tubby  Hook  51 

rated  professional  office-holders."  But  the 
good  old  gentleman  who  pays  the  young  ex- 
collegian's  bills  sometimes  takes  a  great  deal 
of  pleasure — in  his  stupid,  old-fashioned  way— 
in  uniting  with  his  fellow-merchants  of  the 
Swamp  or  Hanover  Square,  to  subscribe  to  a 
testimonial  to  some  one  of  the  best  abused  of 
these  "  indurated  "  sinners,  in  honor  of  his 
distinguished  services  in  lowering  some  tax- 
rate,  in  suppressing  some  nuisance,  in  estab 
lishing  some  new  municipal  safeguard  to  life 
or  property.  This  blood  in  her  may,  in  some 
measure,  account  for  the  vigor  and  enthusiasm 
with  which  this  old  lady  expressed  her  sense 
of  the  loss  the  community  had  sustained  in  the 
death  of  President  Lincoln,  in  April  of  1865. 

Summoning  two  or  three  of  us  youngsters, 
and  a  dazed  Irish  maid  fresh  from  Castle  Gar 
den  and  a  three  weeks'  voyage  in  the  steerage 
of  an  ocean  steamer,  she  led  us  up  to  the  top 
of  the  house,  to  one  of  those  vast  old-time 
garrets  that  might  have  been — and  in  coun 
try  inns  occasionally  were — turned  into  ball 
rooms,  with  the  aid  of  a  few  lights  and  sconces. 
Here  was  stored  the  accumulated  garmenture 


52  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

of  the  household  for  generation  upon  genera 
tion  ;  and  as  far  as  I  could  discover,  every 
member  of  that  family  had  been  born  into  a 
profound  mourning  that  had  continued  unto 
his  or  her  latest  day,  unmitigated  save  for 
white  shirts  and  petticoats.  These  we  bore 
down  by  great  armfuls  to  the  front  portico, 
and  I  remember  that  the  operation  took  nearly 
an  hour.  When  at  length  we  had  covered  the 
shaky  warped  floor  of  the  long  porch  with 
the  strange  heaps  of  black  and  white — linens, 
cottons,  silks,  bombazines,  alpacas,  ginghams, 
every  conceivable  fabric,  in  fashion  or  out  of 
fashion,  that  could  be  bleached  white  or  dyed 
black — the  old  lady  arranged  us  in  working 
order,  and,  acting  at  once  as  directress  and 
chief  worker,  with  incredible  quickness  and 
dexterity  she  rent  these  varied  and  multiform 
pieces  of  raiment  into  broad  strips,  which  she 
ingeniously  twisted,  two  or  three  together, 
stitching  them  at  the  ends  to  other  sets  of 
strips,  until  she  had  formed  immensely  long 
rolls  of  black  and  white.  Mounting  a  tall 
ladder,  with  the  help  of  the  strongest  and  old 
est  of  her  assistants,  she  wound  the  great  tall 


Tiemanris  to  Tubby  Hook 


53 


white  columns  with  these  strips,  fastening 
them  in  huge  spirals  from  top  to  bottom, 
black  and  white 
entwined.  Then 
she  hung  ample 
festoons  between 
the  pillars,  and 
contrived  some 
thing  painfully 
ambitious  in  the 
way  of  rosettes  for 
the  cornice  and 
frieze. 

Then  we  all 
went  out  in  the 
street  and  gazed 
at  the  work  of  our 
hands.  The  ro 
settes  were  a  fail 
ure,  and  the  old 
lady  admitted  it. 
I  have  forgotten  whether  she  said  they  looked 
"mangy,"  or  '"measly,"  or  "peaky;"  but 
she  conveyed  her  idea  in  some  such  graphic 
phrase.  But  I  must  ask  you  to  believe  me 


54  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

when  I  tell  you  that,  from  the  distant  street, 
that  poor,  weather-worn  old  front  seemed  to 
have  taken  on  the  very  grandeur  of  mourning, 
with  its  great,  clean,  strong  columns  simply 
wreathed  in  black  and  snowy  white,  that 
sparkled  a  little  here  and  there  in  the  fitful, 
cold,  spring  sunlight.  Of  course,  when  you 
drew  near  to  it,  it  resolved  itself  into  a  bewil 
dering  and  somewhat  indecent  confusion  of 
black  petticoats,  and  starched  shirts,  and 
drawers,  and  skirts,  and  baby-clothes,  and 
chemises,  and  dickies,  and  neck-cloths,  and 
handkerchiefs,  all  twisted  up  into  the  most 
fantastic  trappings  of  woe  that  ever  decked  a 
genuine  and  patriotic  grief.  But  I  am  glad, 
for  myself,  that  I  can  look  at  it  all  now  from 
even  a  greater  distance  than  the  highway  at 
the  foot  of  the  lawn. 

I  must  admit  that,  even  in  my  day,  the 
shops  and  houses  of  the  Moderate  Means 
colony  had  so  fringed  the  broad  highway  with 
their  trivial,  common-place,  weakly  preten 
tious  architecture,  that  very  little  of  the  dis 
tinctive  character  of  the  old  road  was  left. 
Certainly,  from  Tiemann's  to  the  Deaf  and 


Tiemanris  to   Tubby  Hook  55 

Dumb  Asylum — about  two  miles  of  straight 
road — there  was  little  that  had  any  saving 
grace  of  honorable  age,  except  here  and  there 
where  some  pioneer  shanty  had  squatted  itself 
long  enough  ago  to  have  acquired  a  pleasant 
look  of  faded  shabbiness.  The  tavern  and  the 
stage-office,  it  is  true,  kept  enough  of  their  old 
appearance  to  make  a  link  between  those  days 
and  the  days  when  swarms  of  red-faced  drov 
ers,  with  big  woollen  comfortables  about  their 
big  necks,  and  with  fat,  greasy,  leather  wallets 
stuffed  full  of  bank-notes,  gathered  noisily 
there,  as  it  was  their  wont  to  gather  at  all  the 
"  Bull's  Head  Taverns"  in  and  around  New 
York.  The  omnibuses  that  crawled  out  from 
New  York  were  comparatively  modern — that 
is,  a  Broadway  'bus  rarely  got  ten  or  fifteen 
years  beyond  the  period  of  positive  decrepitude 
without  being  shifted  to  the  Washington 
Heights  line.  But  under  the  big  shed  around 
the  corner  still  stood  the  great  old  George- 
Washington  coach — a  structure  about  the  size 
and  shape  of  a  small  canal-boat,  with  the  most 
beautiful  patriotic  pictures  all  over  it,  of 
which  I  only  remember  Lord  Cornwallis  sur- 


56  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

rendering  his  sword  in  the  politest  and  most 
theatrical  manner  imaginable,  although  the 
poignancy  of  his  feelings  had  apparently 
turned  his  scarlet  uniform  to  a  pale  orange. 
This  magnificent  equipage  was  a  trifle  rheu 
maticky  about  its  underpinning,  but,  drawn  by 
four,  six,  or  eight  horses,  it  still  took  the  road 
on  holidays;  and  in  winter,  when  the  sleighing 
was  unusually  fine,  with  its  wheels  transformed 
into  sectional  runners  like  a  gigantic  bob-sled, 
it  swept  majestically  out  upon  the  road,  where 
it  towered  above  the  flock  of  flying  cutters 
whose  bells  set  the  air  a-j ingle  from  Blooming- 
dale  to  King's  Bridge. 

But  if  the  beauty  of  Broadway  as  a  country 
high-road  had  been  marred  by  its  adaptation 
to  the  exigencies  of  a  suburb  of  moderate 
means,  we  boys  felt  the  deprivation  but  little. 
To  right  and  to  left,  as  we  wandered  north 
ward,  five  minutes'  walk  would  take  us  into  a 
country  of  green  lanes  and  meadows  and 
marshland  and  woodland ;  where  houses  and 
streets  were  as  yet  too  few  to  frighten  away 
that  kindly  old  Dame  Nature  who  was  always 
so  glad  to  see  us.  If  you  turned  to  the  right 


Tiemanns  to   Tubby  Hook 


57 


— to  the  east,  that  is — you  found  the  laurel- 
bordered  fields  where  we  played  baseball — I 
don't  mean  that  the  fields  sprouted  with 
in  those  old  days  of  29  to 


" 


laurels  for  us  boys 
34  scores,  but  that 
the  Kaluiia  lati- 
folia  crowned  the 
gray  rocks  that 
cropped  out  all 
around.  Farther 
up  was  the  won 
derful  and  myste 
rious  old  house  of 
Madame  Jumel — 
Aaron  Burr's  Ma 
dame  Jumel — set 
apart  from  a  1 1 
other  houses  by  its 
associations  with 
the  fierce,  vindictive  passions  of  that  strange 
old  woman,  whom,  it  seems  to  me,  I  can  still 
vaguely  remember,  seated  very  stiff  and  up 
right  in  her  great  old  family  carriage.  At  the 
foot  of  the  heights,  on  this  side,  the  Harlem 
River  flowed  between  its  marshy  margins  to 


58  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

join  Spuyten  Duyvil  Creek — the  Harlem  with 
its  floats  and  boats  and  bridges  and  ramshackle 
docks,  and  all  the  countless  delights  of  a  boat 
ing  river.  Here  also  was  a  certain  dell,  half 
way  up  the  heights  overlooking  McComb's 
Dam  Bridge,  where  countless  violets  grew 
around  a  little  spring,  and  where  there  was  a 
real  cave,  in  which,  if  real  pirates  had  not  left 
their  treasure,  at  least  real  tramps  had  slept 
and  left  a  real  smell.  And  on  top  of  the  cave 
there  was  a  stone  which  was  supposed  to 
retain  the  footprint  of  a  pre-historic  Indian. 
From  what  I  remember  of  that  footprint  I  am 
inclined  to  think  that  it  must  have  been  made 
by  the  foot  of  a  derrick,  and  not  by  that  of  an 
Indian. 

But  it  was  on  the  other  side  of  the  Island, 
between  the  Deaf  and  Dumb  Asylum  and 
Tubby  Hook,  and  between  the  Ridge  and  the 
River,  that  I  most  loved  to  ramble.  Here 
was  the  slope  of  a  \vooclland  height  running 
down  to  a  broad  low  strip,  whose  westernmost 
boundary  was  the  railroad  embankment,  be 
yond  which  lay  the  broad  blue  Hudson,  with 
Fort  Lee  and  the  first  up-springing  of  the 


Ticmanns  to   Tubby  Hook 


59 


Palisades,  to  be  seen  by  glimpses  through  the 
tree-trunks.  This  was,  I  think,  the  prettiest 
piece  of  flower-spangled  wildwood  that  I  have 
ever  seen.  For  centuries  it  had  drained  the 
richness  of  that  long  and  lofty  ridge.  The  life 
of  lawns  and  gardens 
had  gone  into  it ;  the 


dark  wood-soil  had  been  washed  from  out  the 
rocks  on  the  brow  of  the  hill ;  and  down  below 
there,  where  a  vagrom  brooklet  chirped  its  way 
between  green  stones,  the  wholesome  soil 
bloomed  forth  in  grateful  luxuriance.  From 
the  first  coming  of  the  anemone  and  the  he- 
patica,  to  the  time  of  the  asters,  there  was 
always  something  growing  there  to  delight  the 
scent  or  the  sight ;  and  most  of  all  do  I 


6o 


Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


remember  the  huge  clumps  of  Dutchman' s- 
brecches — the  purple  and  the  waxy  white  as 
well  as  the  honey-tipped  scarlet. 

There  were  little  sunlit  clearings  here,  and  I 
well  recall  the  day  when,  looking  across  one  of 
these,  I  saw  something  that  stood  awkwardly 
and  conspicuously  out  of  the  young  wood- 
grass — a  raw  stake  of  pine  wood,  and  beyond 
that,  another  stake,  and  another;  and  parallel 
with  these  another  row,  marking  out  two 
straight  lines,  until  the  bushes  hid  them.  The 
surveyors  had  begun  to  lay  out  the  line  of  the 

new  Boulevard, 
on  w  h  i  c  h  you 
may  now  roll  in 
your  carriage  to 
Inwood,  through 
the  wreck  of  the 
woods  where  I 
used  to  scramble 
over  rock  and 
tree-trunk,  going  toward  Tubby  Hook. 

It  was  on  the  grayest  of  gray  November 
days  last  year  that  I  had  the  unhappy  thought 
of  revisiting  this  love  of  my  youth.  I  fol- 


Ticmanris  to    Tubby  Hook  61 

lowed  familiar  trails,  guided  by  landmarks  I 
could  not  forget — although  they  had  somehow 
grown  incredibly  poor  and  mean  and  shabby, 
and  had  entirely  lost  a  certain  dignity  that 
they  had  until  then  kept  quite  clearly  in  my 
remembrance.  And  behold,  they  were  no 
longer  landmarks  except  to  me.  A  change 
had  come  over  the  face  of  this  old  playground 
of  mine.  It  had  forgotten  the  withered, 
modest  grace  of  the  time  when  it  was  middle- 
aged,  and  when  I  was  a  boy.  It  was  check 
ered  and  gridironed  with  pavements  and  elec 
tric  lights.  The  Elevated  Railroad  roared  at 
its  doors  behind  clouds  of  smoke  and  steam. 
Great,  cheerless,  hideously  ornate  flat  buildings 
reared  their  zinc-tipped  fronts  toward  the  gray 
heaven,  to  show  the  highest  aspirations  of 
that  demoralized  suburb  in  the  way  of  domes 
tic  architecture.  To  right,  to  left,  every  way 
I  turned,  I  saw  a  cheap,  tawdry,  slipshod  imi 
tation  of  the  real  city — or  perhaps  I  should 
say,  of  all  that  is  ugliest  and  vulgarest,  least 
desirable,  and  least  calculated  to  endure,  in 
the  troubled  face  of  city  life.  I  was  glad  to 
get  away;  glad  that  the  gray  mist  that  rolled 


62  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

up  from  the  Hudson  River  hid  from  my  sight 
within  its  fleecy  bosom  some  details  of  that 
vulgar  and  pitiful  degradation.  One  place 
alone  I  found  as  I  had  hoped  to  find  it.  Ex- 
Mayor  Tiemann's  house  was  gone,  his  conser 
vatory  was  a  crumbling  ruin;  the  house  we 
decked  for  Lincoln's  death  was  a  filthy  tene 
ment  with  a  tumble-clown  gallery  where  the 
old  portico  had  stood,  and  I  found  very  little 
on  my  upward  pilgrimage  that  had  not  expe 
rienced  some  change — for  the  worse,  as  it 
seemed  to  me.  The  very  cemetery  that 
belongs  to  old  Trinity  had  dandified  itself  with 
a  wonderful  wall  and  a  still  more  wonderful 
bridge  to  its  annex — or  appendix,  or  exten 
sion,  or  whatever  you  call  it.  But  just  above 
it  is  a  little  enclosure  that  is  called  a  park — a 
place  where  a  few  people  of  modest,  old-fash 
ioned,  domestic  tastes  had  built  their  houses 
together  to  join  in  a  common  resistance  against 
the  encroachments  of  the  speculator  and  the 
nomad  house-hunter.  I  found  this  little  set 
tlement  undisturbed,  uninvaded,  save  by  a  sort 
of  gentle  decay  that  did  it  no  ill-service,  in  my 
eyes.  The  pale  dust  was  a  little  deeper  in  the 


Ticinatin  s  to   Tubby  Hook  63 

roadways  that  had  once  been  paved  with  lime 
stone,  a  few  more  brown  autumn  leaves  had 
fallen  in  the  corners  of  the  fences,  the  clus 
tered  wooden  houses  all  looked  a  little  more 


rustily  respectable  in  their  reserved  and  sleepy 
silence — a  little  bit  more,  I  thought,  as  if  they 
sheltered  a  colony  of  old  maids.  Otherwise  it 
looked  pretty  much  as  it  did  when  I  first  saw 
it,  well  nigh  thirty  years  ago. 

To  see  if  there  were  anything  alive  in  that 
misty,  dusty,  faded  little  abode  of  respectabil- 


64  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

ity,  I  rang  at  the  door  of  one  house,  and  found 
some  inquiries  to  make  concerning  another  one 
that  seemed  to  be  unten anted. 


It  was  a  very  pretty  young  lady  who  opened 
the  door  for  me,  with  such  shining  dark  eyes 


Ticmanns  to   Tubby  Hock  65 

and  with  so  bright  a  red  in  her  cheeks,  that  you 
felt  that  she  could  not  have  been  long  in  that 
dull,  old-time  spot,  where  life  seemed  to  be  all 
one  neutral  color.  She  answered  my  ques 
tions  kindly,  and  then,  with  something  in  her 
manner  which  told  me  that  strangers  did  not 
often  wander  in  there,  she  said  that  it  was  a 
very  nice  place  to  live  in.  I  told  her  that  I 
knew  it  had  been  a  very  nice  place  to  live  in. 


THE   BOWERY   AND   BOHEMIA 


THE   BOWERY  AND   BOHEMIA 

ONE  day  a  good  many  years  ago  an  old 
gentleman  from  Rondout-on-the- Hud 
son — then  plain  Rondout — was  walking  up 
Broadway  seeing  the  sights.  He  had  not 
been  in  New  York  in  ten  or  twelve  years,  and 
although  he  was  an  old  gentleman  who  always 
had  a  cask  of  good  ale  in  his  cellar  in  the  win 
ter-time,  yet  he  had  never  tasted  the  strange 
German  beverage  called  lager-beer,  which  he 
had  heard  and  read  about.  So  when  he  saw 
its  name  on  a  sign  he  went  in  and  drank  a 
mug,  sipping  it  slowly  and  thoughtfully,  as  he 
would  have  sipped  his  old  ale.  He  found  it 
refreshing — peculiar — and,  well,  on  the  whole, 
very  refreshing  indeed,  as  he  considerately 
told  the  proprietor. 

But  what  interested  him  more  than  the  beer 


70  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

was  the  sight  of  a  group  of  young  men  seated 
around  a  table  drinking  beer,  reading — and— 
yes,  actually  writing  verses,  and  bandying  very 
lively  jests  among  themselves.  The  old  gen 


tleman  could  not  help  hearing  their  conversa 
tion,  and  when  he  went  out  into  the  street  he 
shook  his  head  thoughtfully. 

"  I  wonder  what  my  father  would  have  said 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia  71 

to  that  ?"  he  reflected.  '  Young  gentlemen 
sitting  in  a  pot-house  at  high  noon  and  turn 
ing  verses  like  so  many  ballad-mongers !  Well, 
well,  well,  if  those  are  the  ways  of  lager-beer 
drinkers,  I'll  stick  to  my  good  old  ale!  " 

And  greatly  surprised  would  that  honest  old 
gentleman  have  been  to  know  that  the  pres 
ence  of  that  little  group  of  poets  and  humor 
ists  attracted  as  much  custom  to  good  Mr. 
PfarTs  beer-saloon  as  did  his  fresh,  cool  lager; 
and  that  young  men,  and,  for  the  matter  of 
that,  men  not  so  young,  stole  in  there  to  listen 
to  their  contests  of  wit,  and  to  wish  and  yearn 
and  aspire  to  be  of  their  goodly  company. 
For  the  old  gentleman  little  dreamed,  as  he 
went  on  his  course  up  Broadway,  that  he  had 
seen  the  first  Bohemians  of  New  York,  and 
that  these  young  men  would  be  written  about 
and  talked  about  and  versified  about  for  gen 
erations  to  come.  Unconscious  of  this  honor 
he  went  on  to  Fourteenth  Street  to  see  the 
new  square  they  were  laying  out  there. 

Perhaps  nothing  better  marks  the  place 
where  the  city  of  New  York  got  clean  and 
clear  out  of  provincial  pettiness  into  metro- 


72  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

politan  tolerance  than  the  advent  of  the  Bohe 
mians.  Twenty-five  years  earlier  they  would 
have  been  a  scandal  and  a  reproach  to  the 


town.  Not  for  their  literature,  or  for  their 
wit,  or  for  their  hard  drinking,  or  even  for 
their  poverty;  but  for  their  brotherhood,  and 
for  their  calm  indifference  to  all  the  rest  of  the 
world  whom  they  did  not  care  to  receive  into 
their  kingdom  of  Bohemia.  There  is  human 
nature  in  this;  more  human  nature  than  there 
is  in  most  provincialism.  Take  a  community 
of  one  hundred  people  and  let  any  ten  of  its 
members  join  themselves  together  and  dictate 
the  terms  on  which  an  eleventh  may  be  ad- 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia  73 

mitted  to  their  band.  The  whole  remaining 
eighty-nine  will  quarrel  for  the  twelfth  place. 
But  take  a  community  of  a  thousand,  and  let 
ten  such  internal  groups  be  formed,  and  every 
group  will  have  to  canvass  more  or  less  hard  to 
increase  its  number.  For  the  other  nine  hun 
dred  people,  being  able  to  pick  and  choose, 
are  likely  to  feel  a  deep  indifference  to  the 
question  of  joining  any  segregation  at  all.  If 
group  No.  2  says,  "  Come  into  my  crowd,  I 
understand  they  don't  want  you  in  No.  I," 
the  individual  replies:  "  What  the  deuce  do  I 
care  about  No.  I  or  you  either  ?  Here  are 
Nos.  4,  5,  6,  and  7  all  begging  for  me.  If  you 
and  No.  I  keep  on  in  your  conceit  you'll  find 
yourselves  left  out  in  the  cold." 

And  as  it  frequently  happens  to  turn  out 
that  way,  the  dweller  in  a  great  city  soon 
learns,  in  the  first  place,  that  he  is  less  impor 
tant  than  he  thought  he  was ;  in  the  second 
place,  that  he  is  less  unimportant  than  some 
people  would  like  to  have  him  think  himself. 
All  of  which  goes  to  show  that  when  New 
Yorkers  looked  with  easy  tolerance,  and  some 
of  them  with  open  admiration,  upon  the  Bohe- 


74  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

mians  at  PfafTs  saloon,  they  had  come  to  be 
citizens  of  no  mean  city,  and  were  making 
metropolitan  growth. 

A   Bohemian   may   be    defined   as   the    only 


kind  of  gentleman  permanently  in  temporary 
difficulties  who  is  neither  a  sponge  nor  a  cheat. 
He  is  a  type  that  has  existed  in  all  ages  and 
always  will  exist.  He  is  a  man  who  lacks 
certain  elements  necessary  to  success  in  this 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia  75 

world,  and  who  manages  to  keep  fairly  even 
with  the  world,  by  dint  of  ingenious  shift 
and  expedient;  never  fully  succeeding,  never 
wholly  failing.  He  is  a  man,  in  fact,  who 
can't  swim,  but  can  tread  water.  But  he 
never,  never,  never  calls  himself  a  Bohemian 
-—at  least,  in  a  somewhat  wide  experience,  I 
have  known  only  two  that  ever  did,  and  one  of 
these  was  a  baronet.  As  a  rule,  if  you  over 
hear  a  man  approach  his  acquaintance  with  the 
formula,  "  As  one  Bohemian  to  another,"  you 
may  make  up  your  mind  that  that  man  means 
an  assault  upon  the  other  man's  pocket-book, 
and  that  if  the  assault  is  successful  the  dam 
ages  will  never  be  repaired.  That  man  is  not 
a  Bohemian  ;  he  is  a  beat.  Your  true  Bohe 
mian  always  calls  himself  by  some  euphemistic 
name.  He  is  always  a  gentleman  at  odds  with 
fortune,  who  rolled  in  wealth  yesterday  and 
will  to-morro\v,  but  who  at  present  is  willing 
to  do  any  work  that  he  is  sure  will  make  him 
immortal,  and  that  he  thinks  may  get  him  the 
price  of  a  supper.  And  very  often  he  lends 
more  largely  than  he  borrows. 

Now   the    crowd  which  the   old   gentleman 


f6  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

saw  in  the  saloon — and  he  saw  George  Arnold, 
Fitz-James  O'Brien,  and  perhaps  N.  P.  Shep- 
ard — was  a  crowd  of  Bohemians  rather  by  its 
own  christening  than  by  any  ordinary  applica 
tion  of  the  word.  They  were  all  young  men 
of  ability,  recognized  in  their  profession.  Of 
those  who  have  died,  two  at  least  have  honor 
and  literary  consideration  to-day;  of  those 
who  lived,  some  have  obtained  celebrity,  and 
all  a  reasonable  measure  of  success.  Miirger's 
Bohemians  would  have  called  them  Philistines. 
But  they  have  started  a  tradition  that  will 
survive  from  generation  unto  generation ;  a 
tradition  of  delusion  so  long  as  the  glamour  of 
poetry,  romance,  and  adventure  hang  around 
the  mysteriously  attractive  personality  of  a 
Bohemian.  Ever  since  then  New  York  has 
had,  and  always  will  have,  the  posing  Bohe 
mian  and  his  worshippers. 

Ten  or  fifteen  years  ago  the  "  French  Quar 
ter  "  got  its  literary  introduction  to  New  York, 
and  the  fact  was  revealed  that  it  was  the  resort 
of  real  Bohemians — young  men  who  actually 
lived  by  their  wit  and  their  wits,  and  who 
talked  brilliantly  over  fifty-cent  table-d'hote 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia  77 

dinners.  This  was  the  signal  for  the  would-be 
Bohemian  to  emerge  from  his  dainty  flat  or 
his  oak-panelled  studio  in  Washington  Square, 
hasten  clown  to  Bleecker  or  Houston  Street, 
there  to  eat  chicken  badly  braise',  fried  chuck- 
steak,  and  soggy  spaghetti,  and  to  drink  thin 
blue  wine  and  chicory-coffee  that  he  might 
listen  to  the  feast  of  witticism  and  flow  of  soul 
that  he  expected  to  find  at  the  next  table.  If 
he  found  it  at  all,  he  lost  it  at  once.  If  he 
made  the  acquaintance  of  the  young  men  at 
the  next  table,  he  found  them  to  be  young 
men  of  his  own  sort— agreeable  young  boys 
just  from  Columbia  and  Harvard,  who  were 
painting  impressionless  pictures  for  the  love  of 
Art  for  Art's  sake,  and  living  very  comfort 
ably  on  their  paternal  allowances.  Any  one  of 
the  crowd  would  think  the  world  was  coming 
to  pieces  if  he  woke  up  in  the  morning  to  won 
der  where  he  could  get  his  breakfast  on  credit, 
and  wonder  where  he  could  earn  enough  money 
to  buy  his  dinner.  Yet  these  innocent  young 
sters  continue  to  pervade  "  The  Quarter,"  as 
they  call  it;  and  as  time  goes  on,  by  much 
drinking  of  ponies  of  brandy  and  smoking  of 


78  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

cigarettes,  they  get  to  fancy  that  they  them 
selves  are  Bohemians.  And  when  they  get 
tired  of  it  all  and  want  something  good  to  eat, 
they  go  up  to  Delmonico's  and  get  it. 

And  their  Bohemian  predecessors,  who 
sought  the  French  fifty-cent  restaurants  as 
their  highest  attainable  luxury — what  has  be 
come  of  them  ?  They  have  fled  before  that 
incursion  as  a  flock  of  birds  before  a  whirlwind. 
They  leave  behind  them,  perhaps,  a  few  of 
the  more  mean-spirited  among  them,  who  are 
willing  to  degenerate  into  fawners  on  the  rich, 
and  habitual  borrowers  of  trifling  sums.  But 
the  true  Bohemians,  the  men  who  have  the 
real  blood  in  their  veins,  they  must  seek  some 
other  meeting-place  where  they  can  pitch  their 
never-abiding  tents,  and  sit  at  their  humble 
feasts  to  recount  to  each  other,  amid  apprecia 
tive  laughter,  the  tricks  and  devices  and  pitiful 
petty  schemes  for  the  gaining  of  daily  bread 
that  make  up  for  them  the  game  and  comedy 
of  life.  Tell  me  not  that  Ishmael  does  not 
enjoy  the  wilderness.  The  Lord  made  him  for 
it,  and  he  would  not  be  happy  anywhere  else. 

There  was  one  such  child   of  fortune  once, 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia  79 

who  brought  his  blue  eyes  over  from  Ireland. 
His  harmless  and  gentle  life  closed  after  too 
many  years  in  direst  misfortune.  But  as  long 
as  he  wandered  in  the  depths  of  poverty  there 
was  one  strange  and  mysterious  thing  about 
him.  His  clothes,  always  well  brushed  and 
well  carried  on  a  gallant  form,  often  showed 
cruel  signs  of  wear,  especially  when  he  went 
for  a  winter  without  an  overcoat.  But  shabby 
as  his  garments  might  grow,  empty  as  his 
pockets  might  be,  his  linen  was  always  spot 
less,  stiff,  and  fresh.  Now  everybody  who  has 
ever  had  occasion  to  consider  the  matter  knows 
that  by  the  aid  of  a  pair  of  scissors  the  life  of 
a  collar  or  of  a  pair  of  cuffs  can  be  prolonged 
almost  indefinitely — apparent  miracles  had 
been  performed  in  this  way.  But  no  pair  of 
scissors  will  pay  a  laundry  bill ;  and  finally  a 
committee  of  the  curious  waited  upon  this 
student  of  economics  and  asked  him  to  say 
how  he  did  it.  He  was  proud  and  delighted 
to  tell  them. 

"  I-I-I'll  tell  ye,  boys,"  he  said,  in  his  pleas 
ant  Dublin  brogue,  "  but  'twas  I  that  thought 
it  out.  I  wash  them,  of  course,  in  the  basin — 


8o  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

that's  easy  enough;  but  you'd  think  I'd  be 
put  to  it  to  iron  them,  wouldn't  ye,  now  ? 
Well,  I've  invinted  a  substischoot  for  ironing 
—  it's  me  big  books.  Through  all  me  vicissi- 
choods,  boys,  I  kept  me  Bible  and  me  diction 
ary,  and  I  lay  the  collars  and  cuffs  in  the 
undher  one  and  get  the  leg  of  the  bureau  on 
top  of  them  both — and  you'd  be  surprised  at 
the  artistic  effect." 

There  is  no  class  in  society  where  the  sponge, 
the  toady,  the  man  who  is  willing  to  receive 
socially  without  giving  in  return,  is  more 
quickly  found  out  or  more  heartily  disowned 
than  among  the  genuine  Bohemians.  He  is  to 
them  a  traitor,  he  is  one  who  plays  the  game 
unfairly,  one  who  is  willing  to  fill  his  belly  by 
means  to  which  they  will  not  resort,  lax  and 
fantastic  as  is  their  social  code.  Do  you 
know,  for  instance,  what  Jackaling"  is  in 
New  York  ?  A  Jackal  is  a  man  generally  of 
good  address,  and  capable  of  a  display  of  good 
fellowship  combined  with  much  knowledge  of 
literature  and  art,  and  a  vast  and  intimate 
acquaintance  with  writers,  musicians,  and 
managers.  He  makes  it  his  business  to  haunt 

o 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia 


81 


hotels,  theatrical  agencies,  and  managers' 
offices,  and  to  know  whenever,  in  his  language, 
"  a  new  jay  comes  to  town."  The  jay  he  is 


after  is  some  man  generally  from  the  smaller 
provincial  cities,  who  has  artistic  or  theatrical 
aspirations  and  a  pocketful  of  money.  It  is 
the  Jackal's  mission  to  turn  this  jay  into  an 
"angel."  Has  the  gentleman  from  Lockport 
come  with  the  score  of  a  comic  opera  under 
his  arm,  and  two  thousand  dollars  in  his 
pocket  ?  Two  thousand  dollars  will  not  go 


82  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

far  toward  the  production  of  a  comic  opera  in 
these  days,  and  the  jay  finds  that  out  later; 
but  not  until  after  the  Jackal  has  made  him 
intimately  acquainted  with  a  very  gentlemanly 
and  experienced  manager  who  thinks  that  it 
can  be  done  for  that  price  with  strict  econ 
omy.  Has  the  young  man  of  pronounced 
theatrical  talent  arrived  from  Keokuk  with 
gold  and  a  thirst  for  fame?  The  Jackal  knows 
just  the  dramatist  who  will  write  him  the  play 
that  he  ought  to  star  in.  Does  the  wealthy 
and  important  person  from  Podunk  desire  to 
back  something  absolutely  safe  and  sure  in  the 
line  of  theatrical  speculation?  The  Jackal  has 
the  very  thing  for  which  he  is  looking.  And 
in  all  these,  and  in  all  similar  contingencies, 
it  is  a  poor  Jackal  who  does  not  get  his  com 
mission  at  both  ends. 

The  Jackal  may  do  all  these  things,  but  he 
may  not,  if  he  is  treated,  fail  to  treat  in  return. 
I  do  not  mean  to  say  at  all  that  Jackaling  is 
a  business  highly  esteemed,  even  in  darkest 
Bohemia,  but  it  is  considered  legitimate,  and  I 
hope  that  no  gentleman  doing  business  in  Wall 
Street,  or  on  the  Consolidated  Exchange,  will 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia  83 

feel   too   deeply   grieved   when   he    learns    the 
fact. 

But  where  have  the  real  Bohemians  fled  to 
from  the  presence  of  the  too-well-disposed  and 
too-wealthy  children  of  the  Benedick  and  the 
Holbein  ?  Not  where  they  are  likely  to  find 
him,  you  may  be  sure.  The  true  Bohemian 
does  not  carry  his  true  address  on  his  card. 
In  fact,  he  is  delicate  to  the  point  of  sensitive 
ness  about  allowing  any  publicity  to  attach  to 
his  address.  He  communicates  it  confiden 
tially  to  those  with  whom  he  has  business  deal 
ings,  but  he  carefully  conceals  it  from  the 
prying  world.  As  soon  as  the  world  knows  it 
he  moves.  I  once  asked  a  chief  of  the  Bohe 
mian  tribe  whose  residence  was  the  world,  but 
whose  temporary  address  was  sometimes  Paris, 
why  he  had  moved  from  the  Quartier  Latin  to 
a  place  in  Montmartre. 

Had  to,  my  dear  fellow,"  he  answered, 
with  dignity;  "  why  if  you  live  over  on  that 
side  of  the  river  they'll  call  you  a  Bohemian  !  " 

In  Paris  the  home  of  wit  in  poverty  has  been 
moved  across  the  Seine  to  the  south  side  of 
the  hill  up  which  people  climb  to  make  pil- 


84  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

grimages  to  the  Moulin  Rouge  and  the  church 
of  St.  Pierre  de  Montmartre.  In  New  York  it 
has  been  moved  not  only  across  that  river  of 
human  intercourse  that  we  call  Broadway — a 
river  with  a  tidal  ebb  and  flow  of  travel  and 
traffic — but  across  a  wilder,  stranger,  and  more 
turbulent  flood  called  the  Bowery,  to  a  region 
of  which  the  well-fed  and  prosperous  New 
Yorker  knows  very,  very  little. 

As  more  foreigners  walk  on  the  Bowery  than 
walk  on  any  other  street  in  New  York;  and  as 
more  different  nationalities  are  represented 
there  than  are  represented  in  any  other  street 
in  New  York;  and  as  the  foreigners  all  say  that 
the  Bowery  is  the  most  marvellous  thorough 
fare  in  the  world,  I  think  we  arc  justified  in 
assuming  that  there  is  little  reason  to  doubt 
that  the  foreigners  arc  entirely  right  in  the 
matter,  especially  as  their  opinion  coincides 
with  that  of  every  American  who  has  ever 
made  even  a  casual  attempt  to  size  up  the 
Bowery. 

No  one  man  can  thoroughly  know  a  great 
city.  People  say  that  Dickens  knew  London, 
but  I  am  sure  that  Dickens  would  never  have 


T/ie  Bowery  and  Bohemia  85 

said  it.  He  knew  enough  of  London  to  know 
that  no  one  human  mind,  no  one  mortal  life 
can  take  in  the  complex  intensity  of  a  metrop- 


olis.  Try  to  count  a  million,  and  then  try  to 
form  a  conception  of  the  impossibility  of  learn 
ing  all  the  ins  and  outs  of  the  domicile  of  a 


86  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

million  men,  women,  and  children.  I  have 
met  men  who  thought  they  knew  New  York, 
but  I  have  never  met  a  man — except  a  man 
from  a  remote  rural  district — who  thought  he 
knew  the  Bowery.  There  are  agriculturists, 
however,  all  over  this  broad  land  who  have 
entertained  that  supposition  and  acted  on  it 
— but  never  twice.  The  sense  of  humor  is  the 
saving  grace  of  the  American  people. 

I  first  made  acquaintance  with  the  Bowery 
as  a  boy  through  some  lithographic  prints.  I 
was  interested  in  them,  for  I  was  looking  for 
ward  to  learning  to  shoot,  and  my  father  had 
told  me  that  there  used  to  be  pretty  good 
shooting  at  the  upper  end  of  the  Bowery, 
though,  of  course,  not  so  good  as  there  was 
farther  up  near  the  Block  House,  or  in  the 
wood  beyond.  Besides,  the  pictures  showed  a 
very  pretty  country  road  with  big  trees  on 
both  sides  of  it,  and  comfortable  farmhouses, 
and,  I  suppose,  an  inn  with  a  swinging  sign. 
I  was  disappointed  at  first,  when  I  heard  it  had 
been  all  built  up,  but  I  was  consoled  when  the 
glories  of  the  real  Bowery  were  unfolded  to  my 
youthful  mind,  and  I  heard  of  the  butcher-boy 


The  Bowery  and  BoJicniia  87 

and  his  red  sleigh ;  of  the  Bowery  Theatre  and 
peanut  gallery,  and  the  gods,  and  Mr.  Eddy, 
and  the  war-cry  they  made  of  his  name — and 
a  glorious  old  war-cry  it  is,  better  than  any 
college  cries  ever  invented:  "  Hi,  Eddy-eddy- 
eddy  -  eddy  -  eddy  -  eddy-eddy-eddy-eddy  !  "  of 
Mose  and  his  silk  locks;  of  the  fire-engine 
fights,  and  Big  Six,  and  "  Wash-her-down !  " 
of  the  pump  at  Houston  Street ;  of  what  hap 
pened  to  Mr.  Thackeray  when  he  talked  to  the 
tough ;  of  many  other  delightful  things  that 
made  the  Bowery,  to  my  young  imagination, 
one  long  avenue  of  romance,  mystery,  and 
thrilling  adventure.  And  the  first  time  I  went 
in  the  flesh  to  the  Bowery  was  to  go  with  an 
elderly  lady  to  an  optician's  shop. 

"  And  is  this — Yarrow  ? — This  the  stream 
Of  which  my  fancy  cherished, 
So  faithfully,  a  waking  dream  ? 
An  image  that  hath  perished  ! 
O  that  some  minstrel's  harp  were  near, 
To  utter  notes  of  gladness, 
And  chase  this  silence  from  the  air, 
That  fills  my  heart  with  sadness  !  " 

But  the  study  of  the   Bowery  that   I  began 


88  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

that  day  has  gone  on  with  interruption  for  a 
good  many  years,  and  I  think  now  that  I  am 
arriving  at  the  point  where  I  have  some  faint 
glimmerings  of  the  littleness  of  my  knowledge 
of  it  as  compared  with  what  there  is  to  be 
known.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  I  can  begin 
to  size  the  disproportion  up  with  any  accuracy, 
but  I  think  I  have  accomplished  a  good  deal 
in  getting  as  far  as  I  have. 

The  Bowery  is  not  a  large  place,  for  I  think- 
that,  properly  speaking,  it  is  a  place  rather 
than  a  street  or  avenue.  It  is  an  irregularly 
shaped  ellipse,  of  notable  width  in  its  widest 
part.  It  begins  at  Chatham  Square,  which 
lies  on  the  parallel  of  the  sixth  Broadway  block 
above  City  Hall,  and  loses  its  identity  at  the 
Cooper  Union  where  Third  and  Fourth 
Avenues  begin,  so  that  it  is  a  scant  mile  in  all. 
But  it  is  the  alivest  mile  on  the  face  of  the 
earth.  And  it  either  bounds  or  bisects  that 
square  mile  that  the  statisticians  say  is  the  most 
densely  populated  square  mile  on  the  face  of 
the  globe.  This  is  the  heart  of  the  New  York 
tenement  district.  As  the  Bowery  is  the 
Broadway  of  the  East  Side,  the  street  of  its 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia 


,- 


;;£  '   '.tooJB 

5^    limillll  I 


W-T/ 


pleasures,  it  would  be  interesting  enough  if  it 
opened  up  only  this  one  densely  populated 
district.  But  there  is  much  more  to  contribute 
to  its  infinite  variety.  It  serves  the  same  pur- 


go  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

pose  for  the  Chinese  colony  in  Mott,  Pell,  and 
Doyers  Streets,  and  for  the  Italian  swarms  in 
Mulberry  Bend,  the  most  picturesque  and 
interesting  slum  I  have  ever  seen,  and  I  am  an 
ardent  collector  of  slums.  I  have  missed  art 
galleries  and  palaces  and  theatres  and  cathe 
drals  (cathedrals  particularly)  in  various  and 
sundry  cities,  but  I  don't  think  I  ever  missed 
a  slum.  Mulberry  Bend  is  a  narrow  bend  in 
Mulberry  Street,  a  tortuous  ravine  of  tall  tene 
ment  houses,  and  it  is  so  full  of  people  that 
the  throngs  going  and  coming  spread  off  the 
sidewalk  nearly  to  the  middle  of  the  street. 
There  they  leave  a  little  lane  for  the  babies  to 
play  in.  No,  they  never  get  run  over.  There 
is  a  perfect  understanding  between  the  babies 
and  the  peddlers  who  drive  their  wagons  in 
Mulberry  Bend.  The  crowds  are  in  the  street 
partly  because  much  of  the  sidewalk  and  all  of 
the  gutter  is  taken  up  with  venders'  stands, 
which  give  its  characteristic  feature  to  Mul 
berry  Bend.  There  are  displayed  more  and 
stranger  wares  than  uptown  people  ever  heard 
of.  Probably  the  edibles  are  in  the  majority, 
certainly  they  are  the  queerest  part  of  the 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia 


show.  There  are  trays  and  bins  there  in  the 
Bend,  containing  dozens  and  dozens  of  things 
that  you  would  never  guess  | 
were  meant  to  eat  if  you 
didn't  happen  to 
see  a  ham  or  a 
string  of  sausages 
or  some  other 
familiar  object 
among  them.  But  the  color 
of  the  Bend — and  its  color  is 
its  strong  point — comes  from 
its  display  of  wearing  apparel  and  candy.  A 
lady  can  go  out  in  Mulberry  Bend  and  purchase 
every  article  of  apparel,  external  or  private  and 
personal,  that  she  ever  heard  of,  and  some  that 
she  never  heard  of,  and  she  can  get  them  of 
any  shade  or  hue.  If  she  likes  what  they  call 
'Liberty"  colors — soft,  neutral  tones — she 
can  get  them  from  the  second-hand  dealers 
whose  goods  have  all  the  softest  of  shades  that 
age  and  exposure  can  give  them.  But  if  she 
likes,  as  I  do,  bright,  cheerful  colors,  she  can 
get  tints  in  Mulberry  Bend  that  you  could 
warm  your  hands  on.  Reds,  greens,  and  yel- 


92  Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

lows  preponderate,  and  Nature  herself  would 
own  that  the  Italians  could  give  her  points  on 
inventing  green  and  not  exert  themselves  to 
do  it.  The  pure  arsenical  tones  are  preferred 
in  the  Bend,  and,  by  the  bye,  anybody  who 
remembers  the  days  when  ladies  wore  magenta 
and  solferino,  and  wants  to  have  those  dear 
old  colors  set  his  teeth  on  edge  again,  can  go 
to  the  Bend  and  find  them  there.  The  same 
dye-stuffs  that  are  popular  in  the  dress-goods 
are  equally  popular  in  the  candy,  and  candy  is 
a  chief  product  of  Mulberry  Bend.  It  is  piled 
up  in  reckless  profusion  on  scores  of  stands, 
here,  there,  and  everywhere,  and  to  call  the 
general  effect  festal,  would  be  to  speak  slight 
ingly  of  it.  The  stranger  who  enters  Mulberry 
Bend  and  sees  the  dress-goods  and  the  candies 
is  sure  to  think  that  the  place  has  been  deco 
rated  to  receive  him.  No,  nobody  will  hurt 
you  if  you  go  down  there  and  arc  polite,  and 
mind  your  own  business,  and  do  not  step  on 
the  babies.  But  if  you  stare  about  and  make 
comments,  I  think  those  people  will  be  justified 
in  suspecting  that  the  people  uptown  don't 
always  know  how  to  behave  themselves  like 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia 


93 


ladies  and  gentlemen,  so  do  not  bring  disgrace 
on  your  neighborhood,  and  do  not  go  in  a 
cab.  You  will  not  bother  the  babies,  but  you 
will  find  it  trying  to  your  own  nerves. 

There  is  a  good  deal  of  money  in  Mulberry 
Street,  and  some  of  it  overflows  into  the 
Bowery.  From  this  street  also  the  Baxter 


*M«^-f  ^m^-m 

_  -e^a:     <>     *v    tln  'X--=5^fe-i.-  t  .          r  -7-71  -    -  :  - 


Street  variety  of  Jews  find  their  way  into  the 
Bowery.  These  are  the  Jew  toughs,  and  there 
is  no  other  type  of  Jew  at  all  like  them  in  all 
New  York's  assortment  of  Hebrew  types, 
which  cannot  be  called  meagre.  Of  the  Jewish 
types  New  York  has,  as  the  printers  say,  "  a 
full  case." 


94 


Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


But  it  is  on  the  other  side  of  the  Bowery 
that  there  lies  a  world  to  which  the  world 
north  of  Fourteenth  Street  is  a  select  family 
party.  I  could  not  give  even  a  partial  list  of 
its  elements.  Here  dwell  the  Polish  Jews  with 
their  back-yards  full  of  chickens.  The  police 
raid  those  back-yards  with  ready  assiduity,  but 
the  yards  are  always  promptly  replenished.  It 
is  the  police  against  a 
religion,  and  the  odds  are 
against  the  police.  The 
Jew  will  die 
for  it,  if  needs 
b  e  ,  but  h  i  s 
chickens  must 
be  killed  ko- 
s/icr  way  and 
not  Christian 
wray,  but  that 
is  only  the  way 
of  the  Jews:  tin- 
Hungarians,  t  h  e 
Bohemians,  the  Anarchist  Russians,  the  Scan 
dinavians  of  all  sorts  who  come  up  from  the 
wharfs,  the  Irish,  who  are  there,  as  every- 


The  Bowery  and  BoJiemia  95 

where,  the  Portuguese  Jews,  and  all  the  rest 
of  them  who  help  to  form  that  city  within  a 
city — have  they  not,  all  of  them,  ways  of  their 
own  ?  I  speak  of  this  Babylon  only  to  say 
that  here  and  there  on  its  borders,  and,  once 
in  a  way,  in  its  very  heart,  are  rows  or  blocks 
of  plain  brick  houses,  homely,  decent,  respect 
able  relics  of  the  days  when  the  sturdy,  steady 
tradesfolk  of  New  York  built  here  the  homes 
that  they  hoped  to  leave  to  their  children. 
They  are  boarding-  and  lodging-houses  now, 
poor  enough,  but  proud  in  their  respectability 
of  the  past,  although  the  tide  of  ignorance, 
poverty,  vice,  filth,  and  misery  is  surging  to 
their  doors  and  their  back-yard  fences.  And 
here,  in  hall  bedrooms,  in  third-story  backs 
and  fronts,  and  in  half-story  attics,  live  the 
Bohemians  of  to-day,  and  with  them  those 
other  strugglcrs  of  poverty  who  are  destined 
to  become  "successful  men"  in  various 
branches  of  art,  literature,  science,  trade,  or 
finance.  Of  these  latter  our  children  will 
speak  with  hushed  respect,  as  men  who  rose 
from  small  beginnings ;  and  they  will  go  into 
the  school-readers  of  our  grandchildren  along 


96 


Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 


with  Benjamin  Franklin  and  that  contemptible 
wretch  who  got  to  be  a  great  banker  because 
he  picked  up  a  pin,  as  examples  of  what  per 
severance  and  industry  can  accomplish.  From 


what  I  remember  I  foresee  that  those  children 
will  hate  them. 

I  am  not  going  to  give  you  the  addresses  of 
the  cheap  restaurants  where  these  poor,  cheer 
ful  children  of  adversity  are  now  eating  gou- 
lasch  and  Kartoffclsalad  instead  of  the  spa 
ghetti  and  tripe  a  la  mode  dc  Caen  of  their  old 
haunts.  I  do  not  know  them,  and  if  I  did,  I 
should  not  hand  them  over  to  the  mercies  of 
the  intrusive  young  men  from  the  studios  and 
the  bachelors'  chambers.  I  wish  them  good 


The  Bowery  and  Bohemia  97 

digestion  of  their  goulasch  :  for  those  that  are 
to  climb,  I  wish  that  they  may  keep  the  gen 
erous  and  faithful  spirit  of  friendly  poverty; 
for  those  that  are  to  go  on  to  the  end  in  fruit 
less  struggle  and  in  futile  hope,  I  wish  for 
them  that  that  end  may  come  in  some  gentle 
and  happier  region  lying  to  the  westward  of 
that  black  tide  that  ebbs  and  flows  by  night 
and  day  along  the  Bowery  Way. 


THE   STORY   OF  A   PATH 


THE   STORY   OF  A    PATH 

IN  one  of  his  engaging  essays  Mr.  John  Bur 
roughs  tells  of  meeting  an  English  lady 
in  Holyoke,  Mass.,  who  complained  to  him 
that  there  were  no  foot-paths  for  her  to  walk 
on,  whereupon  the  poet-naturalist  was  moved 
to  an  eloquent  expression  of  his  grief  over 
America's  inferiority  in  the  foot-path  line  to 
the  "  mellow  England  "  which  in  one  brief 
month  had  won  him  for  her  own.  Now  I 
know  very  little  of  Holyoke,  Mass.,  of  my  own 
knowledge.  As  a  lecture-town  I  can  say  of 
it  that  its  people  are  polite,  but  extremely 
undemonstrative,  and  that  the  lecturer  is 
expected  to  furnish  the  refreshments.  It  is 
quite  likely  that  the  English  lady  was  right, 
and  that  there  are  no  foot-paths  there. 

I   wish   to   say,    however,    that    I    know   the 


IO2         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

English  lady.  I  know  her — many,  many  of 
her — and  I  have  met  her  a-many  times.  I 
know  the  enchanted  fairyland  in  which  her 
wistful  memory  loves  to  linger.  Often  and 
often  have  I  watched  her  father's  wardian-case 
grow  into  "  papa's  hot-houses;"  the  plain 
brick  house  that  he  leases,  out  Netting  Hill 
way,  swell  into  "  our  family  mansion,"  and 
the  cottage  that  her  family  once  occupied  at 
Stoke  Wigglesworth  change  itself  into  "  the 
country  place  that  papa  had  to  give  up  because 
it  took  so  much  of  his  time  to  see  that  it  was 
properly  kept  up."  And  long  experience  in 
this  direction  enables  me  to  take  that  little 
remark  about  the  foot-paths,  and  to  derive 
from  it  a  large  amount  of  knowledge  about 
Holyoke  and  its  surroundings  that  I  should 
not  have  had  of  my  own  getting,  for  I  have 
never  seen  Holyoke  except  by  night,  nor  am 
I  like  to  see  it  again. 

From  that  brief  remark  I  know  these  things 
about  Holyoke:  It  is  surrounded  by  a  beauti 
ful  country,  with  rolling  hills  and  a  generally 
diversified  landscape.  There  are  beautiful 
green  fields,  I  am  sure.  There  is  a  fine  river 


The  Story  of  a  Path  103 

somewhere  about,  and  I  think  there  must  be 
water-falls  and  a  pretty  little  creek.  The  tim 
ber  must  be  very  fine,  and  probably  there  are 
some  superb  New  England  elms.  The  roads 
must  be  good,  uncommonly  good;  and  there 
must  be  unusual  facilities  for  getting  around 
and  picnicking  and  finding  charming  views  and 
all  that  sort  of  thing. 

Nor  does  it  require  much  art  to  learn  all  this 
from  that  pathetic  plaint  about  the  foot-paths. 
For  the  game  of  the  Briton  in  a  foreign  land  is 
ever  the  same.  It  changes  not  from  genera 
tion  unto  generation.  Bid  him  to  the  feast 
and  set  before  him  all  your  wealth  of  cellar  and 
garner.  Spread  before  him  the  meat,  heap  up 
for  him  the  fruits  of  the  season.  Weigh  down 
the  board  with  every  vegetable  that  the  gar 
dener's  art  can  bring  to  perfection  in  or  out  of 
its  time — white-potatoes,  sweet-potatoes,  lima- 
beans,  string-beans,  fresh  peas,  sweet-corn, 
lettuce,  cauliflower,  Brussels  sprouts,  toma 
toes,  musk-melons  and  water-melons — all  you 
will — no  word  will  you  hear  from  him  till  he 
has  looked  over  the  whole  assortment  and 
discovered  that  you  have  not  the  vegetable 


IO4         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

marrow,  and  that  you  do  not  raise  it.  Then 
will  he  break  forth  and  cry  out  for  his  vege 
table  marrow.  All  these  things  are  naught  to 
him  if  he  cannot  have  his  vegetable  marrow, 
and  he  will  tell  you  about  the  exceeding  good 
ness  and  rarity  of  the  vegetable  marrow,  until 
you  will  figure  it  in  your  mind  like  unto  the 
famous  mangosteen  fruit  of  the  Malay  Penin 
sula,  he  who  once  eats  whereof  tastes  never 
again  any  other  fruit  of  the  earth,  finding  them 
all  as  dust  and  ashes  by  the  side  of  the  man 
gosteen. 

That  is  to  say,  this  will  happen  unless  you 
have  eaten  of  the  vegetable  marrow,  and  have 
the  presence  of  mind  to  recall  to  the  Briton's 
memory  the  fact  that  it  is  nothing  but  a  sec 
ond-choice  summer  squash;  after  which  the 
meal  will  proceed  in  silence.  Just  so  might 
Mr.  Burroughs  have  brought  about  a  sudden 
change  in  the  topic  of  conversation  by  telling 
the  English  lady  that  where  the  American 
treads  out  a  path  he  builds  a  road  by  the  side 
of  it. 

To  tell  the  truth,  I  think  that  the  English 
foot-path  is  something  pathetic  beyond  de- 


The  Story  of  a  Path  105 

scription.  The  better  it  is,  the  older,  the  bet 
ter  worn,  the  more  it  speaks  with  a  sad  signifi 
cance  of  the  long  established  inequalities  of 
old-world  society.  It  means  too  often  the  one 
poor,  pitiful  right  of  a  poor  man,  the  man  who 
must  walk  all  his  life,  to  go  hither  and  thither 
through  the  rich  man's  country.  The  lady 
may  walk  it  for  pleasure  if  she  likes,  but  the 
man  who  walks  it  because  he  must,  turns  up  a 
little  by-path  leading  from  it  to  a  cottage  that 
no  industry  or  thrift  will  make  his  own  ;  and 
for  him  to  aspire  to  a  roadway  to  his  front-door 
would  be  a  gross  piece  of  impertinence  in  a 
man  of  his  station.  It  is  the  remembrance  of 
just  such  right-of-way  foot-paths  as  the  Eng 
lish  lady's  sad  heart  yearned  after  that  recon 
ciles  me  to  a  great  many  hundreds  of  houses 
that  have  recently  been  built  in  the  State  of 
New  Jersey  after  designs  out  of  books  that 
cost  all  the  way  from  twenty-five  cents  to  a 
dollar.  Architecturally  these  are  very  much 
inferior  to  the  English  cottager's  home,  and 
they  occasionally  waken  thoughts  of  incendia 
rism.  But  the  people  who  live  in  them  are 
people  who  insist  on  having  roads  right  to 


106         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

their  front-doors,  and  I  have  heard  them  do 
some  mighty  interesting  talking  in  town-meet 
ing  about  the  way  those  roads  shall  be  laid 
and  who  shall  do  the  laying. 

As  I  have  before  remarked,  I  am  quite  will 
ing  to  believe  that  Holyoke  is  a  pathless  wil 
derness,  in  the  English  lady's  sense.  But 
when  Mr.  Burroughs  makes  the  generalization 
that  there  are  no  foot-paths  in  this  country,  it 
seems  to  me  he  must  be  letting  his  boyhood 
get  too  far  away  from  him. 

For  there  are  foot-paths  enough,  certainly. 
Of  course  an  old  foot-path  in  this  country 
always  serves  to  mark  the  line  of  a  new  road 
when  the  people  who  had  worn  it  take  to  keep 
ing  horses.  But  there  are  thousands  of  miles 
of  paths  criss-crossing  the  country-side  in  all 
of  our  older  States  that  will  never  see  the  dirt- 
cart  or  the  stone-crusher  in  the  lifetime  of  any 
man  alive  to-day. 

Mr.  Burroughs — especially  when  he  is  pub 
lished  in  the  dainty  little  Douglas  duodecimos 
—is  one  of  the  authors  whose  books  a  busy 
man  reserves  for  a  pocket-luxury  of  travel. 
So  it  was  that,  a  belated  reader,  I  came  across 


THROUGH    THE    RICH    MANS    COUNTRY 


The  Story  of  a  Path  109 

his  lament  over  our  pathlessness,  some  years 
after  my  having  had  a  hand — or  a  foot,  as  you 
might  say — in  the  making  of  a  certain  cross- 
lots  foot-way  which  led  me  to  study  the  wind 
ings  and  turnings  of  the  longer  country-side 
walks  until  I  got  the  idea  of  writing  "  The 
Story  of  a  Path."  I  am  sorry  to  contradict 
Mr.  Burroughs,  but,  if  there  are  no  foot-paths 
in  America,  what  becomes  of  the  many  good 
golden  hours  that  I  have  spent  in  well-tracked 
woodland  ways  and  in  narrow  foot  -  lanes 
through  the  wind-swept  meadow  grass  ?  I  can 
not  give  these  up ;  I  can  only  wish  that  Mr. 
Burroughs  had  been  my  companion  in  them. 

A  foot-path  is  the  most  human  thing  in 
inanimate  nature.  Even  as  the  print  of  his 
thumb  reveals  the  old  offender  to  the  detec 
tives,  so  the  path  tells  you  the  sort  of  feet  that 
wore  it.  Like  the  human  nature  that  created 
it,  it  starts  out  to  go  straight  when  strength 
and  determination  shape  its  course,  and  it  goes 
crooked  when  weakness  lays  it  out.  Until  you 
begin  to  study  them  you  can  have  no  notion 
of  the  differences  of  character  that  exist  among 
foot-paths.  One  line  of  trodden  earth  seems 


no         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

to  you  the  same  as  another.  But  look!  Is 
the  path  you  are  walking  on  fairly  straight 
from  point  to  point,  yet  deflected  to  avoid 
short  rises  and  falls,  and  is  it  zvorn  to  grade  ? 
That  is,  does  it  plough  a  deep  way  through 
little  humps  and  hillocks  something  as  a  street 
is  cut  down  to  grade  ?  If  you  see  this  path 
before  you,  you  maybe  sure  that  it  is  made  by 
the  heavy  shuffle  of  workingmen's  feet.  A 
path  that  wavers  from  side  to  side,  especially 
if  the  turns  be  from  one  bush  to  another,  and 
that  is  only  a  light  trail  making  an  even  line  of 
wear  over  the  inequalities  of  the  ground — that 
is  a  path  that  children  make.  The  path  made 
by  the  business  man — the  man  who  is  anxious 
to  get  to  his  work  at  one  end  of  the  day,  and 
anxious  to  get  to  his  home  at  the  other — is 
generally  a  good  piece  of  engineering.  This 
type  of  man  makes  more  paths  in  this  country 
than  he  does  in  any  other.  He  carries  his 
intelligence  and  his  energy  into  every  act  of 
life,  and  even  in  the  half-unconscious  business 
of  making  his  own  private  trail  he  generally 
manages  to  find  the  line  of  least  resistance  in 
getting  from  one  given  point  to  another. 


The  Story  of  a  Path  1 1 1 

This  is  the  story  of  a  path  : 

It  is  called  Reub  Levi's  Path,  because  Reu 
ben  Levi  Dodd  is  supposed  to  have  made  it, 
some  time  in  1830  or  thereabout,  when  he  built 
his  house  on  the  hill.  But  it  is  much  older 
than  Reuben  Levi.  He  probably  thought  he 
was  telling  the  truth  when,  forty  years  ago,  he 
swore  to  having  broken  the  path  himself 
twenty  years  before,  through  the  Jacobus 
woods,  down  the  hill  and  across  the  flat  lands 
that  then  belonged  to  the  Onderdoncks,  and 
again  through  the  Ogden  woods  to  the  county 
road ;  but  he  forgot  that  on  the  bright  June  day 
when  he  first  started  to  find  a  convenient  way 
through  the  woods  and  over  the  broad  lowland 
fields  from  his  own  front-door  to  that  of  his 
father-in-law,  Evert  Ogden,  and  then  through 
Mr.  Ogden 's  patch  of  woods  to  the  little  town 
on  the  bank  of  the  Passaic — he  forgot  that  for 
a  little  part  of  the  way  he  had  had  the  help  of 
a  man  whose  feet  had  long  before  done  with 
walking  the  paths  of  earth. 

The  forest,  for  it  was  a  forest  then,  was  full 
of  heavy  underwood  and  brush,  and  he  had 
no  choice  but  to  dodge  his  way  between  the 


1 1 2          Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

clumps.  But  when  he  got  out  to  the  broad 
open  space  on  the  brow  of  the  hill,  where  no 
trees  had  ever  grown,  he  found  an  almost 


tropical  growth  of  wild  grass  and  azalea,  with 
bull-brier  twining  over  everything  in  every 
direction.  He  found  it  worse  than  the  dense 
woods. 


The  Story  of  a  PatJi  1 1 3 

Drat  the  pesky  stuff,"  he  said   to  himself; 

ain't  there  no  way  through  it  ?  "  Then  as  he 
looked  about  he  spied  a  line  no  broader  than 
his  hand  at  the  bottom,  that  opened  clean 
through  the  bull-brier  and  the  bushes  across 
the  open  to  where  the  trees  began  again  on 
the  down-slope  of  the  hill.  Grass  was  grow 
ing  in  it,  but  he  knew  it  for  an  old  trail. 

'Twas  Pelatiah  Jinks  made  that,  I'll  bet  a 
shilling,"  he  said  to  himself,  remembering  the 
lonely  old  trapper  who  had  dwelt  on  that 
mountain  in  his  father's  time.  He  had  once 
seen  old  man  Jinks's  powder-horn,  with  its 
elaborate  carving,  done  in  the  long  solitary 
hours  when  the  old  man  sat  weather-bound  in 
his  lofty  hermitage. 

'  Jest  like  the  old  critter  to  make  a  bee-line 
track  like  that.  But  what  in  thunder  did  he 
want  to  go  that  way  across  the  clearing  for  ? 
I'm  much  obleeged  to  him  for  his  trail,  but  it 
ain't  headed  right  for  town." 

No,  it  was  not.      But  young  Dodd  did  not 

remember  that   the   trees   whose   tops  he  saw 

just  peeping  over  the  hill  were  young  things 

of    forty    years'    growth    that    had    taken    the 

8 


1 14         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

place  of  a  line  of  ninety-year-old  chestnuts 
that  had  died  down  from  the  top  and  been 
broken  down  by  the  wind  shortly  after  old 


Pelatiah  died.  The  line  that  the  old  man  had 
made  for  himself  took  him  straight  to  the  one 
little  hillock  where  he  could  look  over  this  tall 


The  Story  of  a  Path  \  \  5 

screen  and  get  his  bearings  afresh  by  the  glint 
of  the  Passaic's  water  in  the  woody  valley 
below,  for  at  no  other  spot  along  that  ridge 
was  the  Passaic  visible. 

Now  in  this  one  act  of  Reuben  Levi  Dodd 
you  can  see  the  human  nature  that  lies  at  the 
bottom  of  all  path-making.  He  turned  aside 
from  his  straight  course  to  walk  in  the  easy 
way  made  by  another  man,  and  then  fetched  a 
compass,  as  they  used  to  say  in  the  Apostle 
Paul's  time,  to  get  back  to  his  straight  bear 
ings.  Old  Pelatiah  had  a  good  reason  for 
deviating  from  his  straight  line  to  the  town ; 
young  Dodd  had  none,  except  that  it  was 
\viser  to  go  two  yards  around  than  to  go  one 
yard  straight  through  the  bull-brier.  Young 
Dodd  had  a  powder-horn  slung  from  his  shoul 
der  that  morning,  and  the  powder-horn  had 
some  carving  on  it,  but  it  was  not  like  the 
carving  on  old  Pclatiah's  horn.  There  was  a 
letter  R,  cut  with  many  flourishes,  a  letter  L 
cut  but  wanting  most  of  its  flourishes,  and  a 
letter  D  half  finished,  and  crooked  at  that,  and 
without  the  first  trace  of  a  flourish.  That 
was  the  way  his  powder-horn  looked  that 


Il6         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

day,  for  that  was  the  way  it  looked  when  he 
died,  and  his  son  sold  it  to  a  dealer  in  an 
tiquities. 

Young  Docld  and  his  wife  found  it  lonely 
living  up  there  on  the  hill-top.  They  were 
the  first  who  had  pushed  so  far  back  from  the 
river  and  the  town.  Mrs.  Dodd,  who  had  an 
active  and  ambitious  spirit  in  her,  often  re 
proached  her  husband  for  his  neglect  to  make 
their  home  more  accessible  to  her  old  friends 
in  the  distant  town. 

"  If  you'd  take  a  bill-hook,"  she  would  say, 
"  and  clean  up  that  snake-fence  path  of  yours 
a  little,  may  be  folks  would  climb  up  here  to 
see  us  once  in  a  blue  moon.  It's  all  well 
enough  for  you  with  your  breeches,  but  how 
are  women  folks  to  trail  their  frocks  through 
that  brush  ?" 

Reub  Lcvi  would  promise  and  promise,  and 
once  he  did  take  his  hook  and  chop  out  a 
hundred  yards  or  so.  But  things  did  not  mend 
until  Big  Bill  Turnbull,  known  all  over  the 
county  as  the  Hard  Job  Man,  married  a  widow 
with  five  children,  bought  a  little  patch  of  five 
or  six  acres  next  to  Docld's  big  farm,  built  a 


The  Story  of  a  Path  1 1 7 

log-cabin    for    himself     and     his     family,    and 
settled  down  there. 

Now  Turnbull's  log-cabin  was  so  situated 
that  the  line  of  old  Pelatiah's  path  through  the 
bull-brier,  extended  about  an  eighth  of  a  mile, 
would  just  reach  the  front-door.  Turnbull 
saw  this,  and  it  was  at  that  point  that  he 
tapped  Reub  Levi's  foot-path  to  the  town. 
But  he  did  his  tapping  after  his  own  fashion. 
He  took  his  wife's  red  flannel  petticoat  and 
tied  it  to  a  sapling  on  the  top  of  the  mound 
that  the  old  hunter  used  to  climb,  and  then 
with  bill-hook  and  axe  he  cut  a  straight  swath 
through  the  woods.  He  even  cut  down  through 
the  roots  and  took  out  the  larger  stones. 

'  That's  what  you'd  ought  to  have  done 
long  ago,  Reuben  Levi  Dodd,"  said  his  wife, 
as  she  watched  this  manifestation  of  energy. 

"  Guess  I  didn't  lose  much  by  waiting," 
Reub  Levi  answered,  with  a  smile  that  did  not 
look  as  self-satisfied  as  he  tried  to  make  it. 

I'd  a-had  to  do  it  myself,  and  now  the  other 
fellow's  done  it  for  me." 

And  thereafter  he  took  Bill  Turnbull's  path 
just  where  it  touched  the  corner  of  his  own 


1 1 8         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

cleared  land.      But  Malvina  Dodd,  to  the  day 
of  her  death,  never  once  walked  that  way,  but, 


going  and  coining,  took  the  winding  track  that 
her  husband  had  laid  out  for  her  when  their 
home  was  built. 


The  Story  of  a  Path  1 19 

The  next  maker  of  the  path  was  a  boy  not 
ten  years  old.  His  name  was  Philip  Wessler, 
and  he  was  a  charity  boy  of  German  parent 
age,  who  had  been  adopted  by  an  eccentric 
old  man  in  the  town,  an  herb-doctor.  This 
calling  was  in  more  repute  in  those  days  than 
it  is  now.  Old  Doctor  Van  Wagener  was  grow 
ing  feeble,  and  he  relied  on  the  boy,  who  was 
grateful  and  faithful,  to  search  for  his  stock  of 
simples.  When  the  weather  was  favorable 
they  would  go  together  through  the  Ogclen 
woods,  and  across  the  meadows  to  where  the 
other  woods  began  at  the  bottom  of  the  hill. 
Here  the  old  man  would  sit  down  and  wait, 
while  the  boy  climbed  the  steep  hillside,  and 
ranged  hither  and  thither  in  his  search  for  sas 
safras  and  liverwort,  and  a  hundred  and  one 
plants,  flowers,  and  herbs,  in  which  the  doctor 
found  virtue.  When  he  had  collected  his 
bundle  he  came  running  down  the  path  to 
where  the  doctor  sat,  and  left  them  for  the  old 
man  to  pick  and  choose  from,  while  he  darted 
off  after  another  load. 

He  did  a  boy's  work  with  the  path.  Steep 
grades  were  only  a  delight  to  him,  and  so  in 


1 20         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

the  course  of  a  year  or  two  he  trod  out,  or 
jumped  out,  a  series  of  break-neck  short-cuts. 
William  Turnbull — people  called  him  William 


now,  since  he  had  built  a  clap-board  house, 
and  was  using  the  log-cabin  for  a  barn — Wil 
liam  Turnbull,  observing  these  short-cuts, 
approved  of  their  purpose,  but  not  of  their 
method.  He  went  through  the  woods  once  or 


The  Story  of  a  Path 


121 


twice  on  odd  days  after  his  hay  was  in,  and 
did  a  little  grading  with  a  mattock.  Here  and 
there  he  made  steps  out  of  flat  stones.  He 
told  his  wife  he 


thought    it    would    be   some 


handier  for  her,  and  she  told  him — they  were 
both  from  Connecticut  —  that  it  was  quite 
some  handier,  and  that  it  was  real  thoughtful 


1 22         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

of  him;  and  that  she  didn't  want  to  speak  no 
ill  of  the  dead,  but  if  her  first  man  had  been 
that  considerate  he  wouldn't  never  have  got 
himself  drowned  going  pickerel  fishing  in 
March,  when  the  ice  was  so  soft  you'd  suppose 
rational  folks  would  keep  off  of  it. 

This  path  was  a  path  of  slow  formation.  It 
was  a  path  that  was  never  destined  to  become 
a  road.  It  is  only  in  mathematics  that  a 
straight  line  is  the  shortest  distance  between 
two  points.  The  grade  through  the  Jacobus 
woods  was  so  steep  that  no  wagon  could  have 
been  hauled  up  it  over  the  mud  roads  of  that 
day  and  generation.  Lumber,  groceries,  and 
all  heavy  truck  were  taken  around  by  the  road, 
that  made  a  clean  sweep  around  the  hill,  and 
was  connected  with  the  Dodcl  and  Turnbull 
farms  by  a  steep  but  short  lane  which  the 
workmen  had  made  when  they  built  the  Dodd 
house.  The  road  was  six  miles  to  the  path's 
three,  but  the  drive  was  shorter  than  the  walk. 

There  was  a  time  when  it  looked  as  though 
the  path  might  really  develop  into  a  road. 
That  was  the  time  when  the  township,  having 
outgrown  the  county  roads,  began  to  build 


The  Story  of  a  Path  123 

roads  for  itself.  But,  curiously  enough,  two 
subjects  of  Great  Britain  settled  the  fate  of 
that  New  Jersey  path.  The  controversy  be 
tween  Telford  and  Macadam  was  settled  so 
long  ago  in  Macadam's  favor,  that  few  remem 
ber  the  point  of  difference  between  those  two 
noted  engineers.  Briefly  stated,  it  was  this: 
Mr.  Telford  said  it  ivas,  and  Mr.  Macadam  said 
it  was  not,  necessary  to  put  a  foundation  of 
large  flat  stones,  set  on  end,  under  a  broken- 
stone  road.  Reuben  Levi's  township,  like 
many  other  New  Jersey  townships,  sided  with 
Mr.  Telford,  and  made  a  mistake  that  cost 
thousands  of  dollars  directly,  and  millions  indi 
rectly.  To-day  New  Jersey  can  show  the  way 
to  all  her  sister  States  in  road-building  and 
road-keeping.  But  the  money  she  wasted  on 
costly  Telford  pavements  is  only  just  begin 
ning  to  come  back  to  her,  as  she  spreads  out 
mile  after  mile  of  the  economical  Macadam. 
Reuben  Levi's  township  squandered  money 
on  a  few  miles  of  Telford,  raised  the  tax-rate 
higher  than  it  had  ever  been  before,  and 
opened  not  one  inch  of  new  road  for  fifteen 
years  thereafter.  And  within  that  fifteen  years 


1 24         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  La  tie 

the  canal  came  up  on  one  side,  opening  a  way 
to  the  great  manufacturing  town,  ten  miles 
clown  the  river;  and  then  the  town  at  the  end 
of  the  path  was  no  longer  the  sole  base  of  sup 
plies.  Then  the  railroad  came  around  on  the 
other  side  of  the  hill,  and  put  a  flag-station 
just  at  the  bottom  of  what  had  come  to  be 
known  as  Dodd's  Lane.  And  thus  by  the 
magic  of  nineteenth-century  science  New  York 
and  Newark  were  brought  nearer  to  the  hill 
side  farm  than  the  town  three  miles  away. 

But  year  by  year  new  feet  trod  the  path. 
The  laborers  who  cut  the  canal  found  it  and 
took  it  when  they  left  their  shanty  camp  to 
go  to  town  for  Saturday-night  frolics.  Then 
William  Turnbull,  who  had  enlarged  his  own 
farm  as  far  as  he  found  it  paid,  took  to  buy 
ing  land  and  building  houses  in  the  valley 
beyond.  Rcub  Levi  laughed  at  him,  but  he 
prospered  after  a  way  he  had,  and  built  up  a 
thriving  little  settlement  just  over  the  canal. 
The  people  of  this  little  settlement  soon  made 
a  path  that  connected  with  Reuben  Levi's, 
by  way  of  William  Turnbull's,  and  whenever 
business  or  old  association  took  them  to  town 


THE  LABORERS   .        FOUND  IT  AND  TOOK  IT  " 


The  Story  of  a  Path  127 

they  helped  to  make  the  path  longer  and 
broader. 

By  and  by  the  regular  wayfarers  found  it  out 
— the  peddlers,  the  colporteurs,  the  wander 
ing  portrait-painters,  the  tinkers  and  clock- 
menders,  the  runaway  apprentices,  and  all  the 
rest  of  the  old-time  gentry  of  the  road.  And 
they  carried  the  path  on  still  farther — down 
the  river  to  Newark. 

It  is  not  wholly  to  be  told,  "  The  Story  of 
the  Path."  So  many  people  had  to  do  with 
its  making  in  so  many  ways  that  no  chronicle 
could  tell  all  the  meanings  of  its  twists  and 
turns  and  straight  lines.  There  is  one  little 
jog  in  its  course  to-day,  where  it  went  around 
a  tree,  the  stump  of  which  rotted  down  into 
the  ground  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago.  Why 
do  we  walk  around  that  useless  bend  to-day  ? 
Because  it  is  a  path,  and  because  we  walk  in 
the  way  of  human  nature. 

The  life  of  a  tree  may  be  a  hundred  years  or 
two  hundred  years  and  yet  be  long  life.  But 
the  days  of  the  age  of  a  man  are  threescore 
and  ten,  and  though  some  be  so  strong  that 
they  come  to  fourscore,  yet  the  strong  man 


128         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

may   be   stricken    down    in   the    flower    of   his 
strength,  if  it  be  the  will  of  the  Lord. 

When  William  Turnbull  came  to  die  he  was 


but  twoscore  years  and  five,  but  for  all  he  was 
so  young  the  people  of  the  township  gathered 
from  far  and  near,  for  he  had  been  a  helpful 
man  all  his  days,  and  those  whom  he  had 


The  Story  of  a  PatJi  129 

helped  remembered  that  he  would  help  them 
no  more.  Four  men  and  four  women  sat  up 
with  the  dead,  twice  as  many  as  the  old  cus 
tom  called  for.  One  of  the  men  was  a  Judge, 
two  had  been  Chosen  Freeholders,  and  the 
fourth  was  his  hired  man.  There  was  no 
cemetery  in  the  township,  and  his  tomb  had 
been  built  at  the  bottom  of  the  hill,  looking 
out  on  the  meadows  which  he  had  just  made 
his  own — the  last  purchase  of  his  life. 

There  were  two  other  pall-bearers  to  carry 
him  on  their  shoulders  to  the  place  beyond 
which  no  man  goes.  These  two,  when  they 
left  the  house  on  the  night  before  the  funeral, 
walked  slowly  and  thoughtfully  down  the  path 
together.  They  looked  over  every  step  of  the 
way  with  to-morrow's  slow  and  toilsome  march 
in  their  minds.  When  they  came  to  the  turn 
by  Pelatiah's  mound  they  paused. 

'  We  can't  never  get  him  round  that  bend," 
said  one.  '  That  ain't  no  way  to  start  down 
the  hill.  Best  is  I  come  here  first  thing  in  the 
morning  and  cut  a  way  through  this  bull-brier 
straight  across  the  angle,  then  we  can  see 
ahead  where  we* re  going.  Put  them  two  light 
9 


1 30         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

men  behind,  and  you  and  me  at  the  head,  and 
we  can  manage  it.  My !  what  a  man  he  was, 
though  !  Why,  I  seen  him  take  the  head  of  a 
coffin  all  by  himself  once." 

This  man  was  a  near  neighbor  of  the  Turn- 
bulls,  for  now  they  had  a  number  of  neighbors; 
Reuben  Levi  Dodd  had  been  selling  small 
farms  off  his  big  farm — somehow  he  had  never 
made  the  big  farm  a  success.  There  are  many 
services  of  men  to  man  that  country  neighbors 
make  little  of,  though  to  the  dwellers  in  great 
cities  they  might  seem  strange  burdens.  At 
five  o'clock  the  next  morning  Warren  Free 
man,  the  pall-bearer,  went  out  and  mowed  and 
hacked  a  path  through  the  tangled  field  from 
midway  of  old  Pelatiah's  trail  down  to  a  short 
cut  made  by  the  doctor's  charity  boy,  who  was 
to-day  a  Judge.  This  Judge  came  out  of  the 
silent  house,  released  by  the  waking  hour, 
from  his  vigil  with  the  dead.  He  watched  his 
fellow  pall-bearer  at  work. 

"  I  used  to  go  down  that  path  on  the  dead 
run  twenty  years  ago,"  said  he,  "  when  I  was 
working  for  Dr.  Van  Wagener  and  he  used  to 
send  me  up  here  gathering  herbs." 


I  USED  TO  GO  DOWN  THAT  PATH  ON  THE  DEAD  RUN 


The  Story  of  a  Path  133 

'  You'll  go  down  it  on  the  dead  walk  to 
morrow,  Jedge, "  said  the  other,  pausing  in  his 
work,  "  and  you  want  to  step  mighty  careful, 
or  one  fun'l  will  breed  another." 

Life,  death,  wedlock,  the  lingering  of  lovers, 
the  waywardness  of  childish  feet,  the  tread  of 
weary  toil,  the  slow,  swaying  walk  of  the 
mother,  with  her  babe  in  her  arms,  the  meas 
ured  steps  of  the  bearer  of  the  dead,  the  light 
march  of  youth  and  strength  and  health — all, 
all  have  helped  to  beat  out  the  strange,  wan 
dering  line  of  the  old  path  ;  and  to  me,  who 
love  to  find  and  to  tread  its  turns,  the  current 
of  their  human  life  flows  still  alone  its  course, 

o 

in  the  dim  spaces  under  the  trees,  or  out  where 
the  sunshine  and  the  wind  are  at  play  upon  the 
broad,  bright  meadows. 


THE   LOST  CHILD 


THE    LOST   CHILD 

THE  best  of  life  in  a  great  city  is  that  it 
breeds  a  broad  and  tolerant  catholicity 
of  spirit :  the  best  of  country  life  is  that  it 
breeds  the  spirit  of  helpful,  homely,  kindly 
neighborliness.  The  suburban-dweller,  who 
shares  in  both  lives,  is  perhaps  a  little  too 
ready  to  pride  himself  in  having  learned  the 
lesson  of  the  great  metropolis,  but  the  other 
and  homelier  lesson  is  taught  so  gradually  and 
so  unobtrusively,  that  he  often  learns  it  quite 
unconsciously;  and  goes  back,  perhaps,  to  his 
old  existence  in  the  city,  only  to  realize  that  a 
certain  charm  has  gone  out  of  life  which  he 
misses  without  knowing  just  what  he  has  lost. 
He  thinks,  perhaps,  it  is  exercise  he  lacks. 
And  it  is,  indeed — the  exercise  of  certain 
gentle  sympathies,  that  thrive  as  poorly  in  the 


138         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

town's  crowded  life  as  the  country  wild-flowers 
thrive  in  the  flower-pots  of  tenement-house 
windows. 

It  was  between  three  and  four  o'clock  of  an 
August  night — a  dark,  warm,  hazy  night, 
breathless,  heavy  and  full  of  the  smell  of  grass 
and  trees  and  dew-moistened  earth,  when  a 
man  galloped  up  one  of  those  long  suburban 
streets,  where  the  houses  stand  at  wide  inter 
vals,  each  behind  its  trim  lawn,  or  old-fash 
ioned  flower-garden,  relieved,  even  in  the 
darkness,  against  a  great  rear-wood  screen  of 
lofty  trees.  Up  the  driveway  of  one  of  these 
he  turned,  his  horse's  hoof-beats  dropping 
clear  and  sharp  on  the  hard  macadam.  He 
reined  up  at  the  house  and  rapped  a  loud 
tattoo  with  the  stock  of  his  whip  on  a  pillar 
of  the  veranda. 

It  was  a  minute  or  two  before  the  noise, 
loud  as  it  was,  had  reached  the  ears  of  two 
sleepers  in  the  bedroom,  just  above  his  head. 
A  much  less  startling  sound  would  have  awak 
ened  a  whole  city  household ;  but  slumber  in 
the  country  has  a  slumber  of  its  own :  in  sum 
mer  time  a  slumber  born  of  night-air,  laden 


The  Lost  Child 


139 


with  the  odors  of  vegetation,  and  silent  except 
for  the  drowsy  chirp  of  birds  that  stir  in  vine 
and  tree.  The  wife  awoke  first,  listened  for  a 
second,  and  aroused  her  husband,  who  went 
to  the  window.  He  raised  the  screen  and 
looked  out. 

"  Who  is  it  ?  "   he  said,  without  nervousness 
or    surprise,   though    ten  years    before    in    his 


city  home  such  a  summons  might  have  shaken 
his  spirit  with  anxious  dread. 

"  I'm  Latimer, "  said  the  man  on  the  horse, 


140         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

briefly.  '  That  boy  of  Penrhyn's — the  little 
one  with  the  yellow  hair — is  lost.  He  got  up 
and  slipped  out  the  house,  somehow,  about 
an  hour  ago,  they  think,  and  they've  found 
one  of  his  playthings  nearly  half  a  mile  down 
the  Romneytown  Road." 

'  Where  shall  I  meet  you  ?"  asked  the  man 
at  the  window. 

"  At  the  Gun-Club  grounds  on  the  hill," 
replied  Latimer;  "  we've  sent  a  barrel  of  oil 
up  there  for  the  lanterns.  So  long,  Halford. 
Is  Dirck  at  home  ?  " 

'Yes,"  said  Halford;  and  without  another 
word  Latimer  galloped  into  the  darkness,  and 
in  a  minute  the  sound  of  his  tattoo  was  heard 
on  the  hollow  pillars  of  the  veranda  of  the 
house  next  door. 

This  was  the  summons — a  bare  announce 
ment  of  an  event  without  appeal,  request,  sug 
gestion,  or  advice.  None  of  these  things  was 
needed.  Enough  had  been  said  between  the 
two  men,  though  they  knew  each  other  only  as 
distant  neighbors.  Each  knew  well  what  that 
summons  meant,  and  what  duty  it  involved. 

The    rat-tat   of   Latimer' s    crop  had    hardly 


The  Lost  Child  141 

sounded  before  a  cheery  young  voice  rang  out 
on  the  air. 

"  All  right,  old  man!  I  heard  you  at  Hal- 
ford's.  Go  ahead." 

It  was  Dirck's  voice.  Dirck  had  another 
name,  a  good  long,  Holland-Dutch  one,  but 
everybody,  even  the  children,  called  him  by 
his  Christian  name,  and  as  he  had  lived  to 
thirty  without  getting  one  day  older  than 
eighteen,  we  will  consider  the  other  Dutch 
name  unnecessary.  Dirck  and  Halford  were 
close  friends  and  close  neighbors.  They  were 
two  men  who  had  reached  a  point  of  perfect 
community  of  tastes  and  inclinations,  though 
they  came  together  in  two  widely  different 
starting-places — though  they  were  so  little 
alike  to  outward  seeming  that  they  were  known 
among  their  friends  as  "  the  mismates. " 
Though  one  was  forty  and  the  other  but  thirty, 
each  had  closed  a  career,  and  was  somewhat 
idly  seeking  a  new  one.  As  Dirck  expressed 
it,  "  We  two  fellows  had  played  our  games 
out,  and  were  waiting  till  we  strike  another 
that  was  high  enough  for  our  style.  We  ain't 
playing  limit  games." 


142         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

Two  very  different  games  they  had  been, 
but  neither  had  been  a  small  one.  Dirck  had 
started  in  with  a  fortune  to  "  do  "  the  world — 
the  whole  world,  nothing  else  would  suit  him. 
He  had  been  all  over  the  globe.  He  had  lived 
among  all  manner  of  peoples.  He  had  ridden 
everything  ridable,  shot  everything  shootable, 
climbed  everything  climbable,  and  satisfied 
himself,  as  he  said,  that  the  world  was  too 
small  for  any  particular  use.  At  the  end  of 
his  travels  he  had  a  little  of  his  fortune  left,  a 
vast  amount  of  experience,  the  constitution  of 
a  red  Indian,  and  a  vocabulary  so  vast  and  so 
peculiar  that  it  stunned  and  fascinated  the 
stranger.  Halford  was  a  New  York  lawyer, 
gray,  clean-shaven,  and  sharp  of  feature.  His 
"game"  had  made  him  famous  and  might 
have  made  him  wealthy,  but  he  cared  neither 
for  fame  nor  wealth.  For  twenty  years  he  had 
fought  a  host  of  great  corporations  to  estab 
lish  one  single  point  of  law.  His  antagonists 
had  vainly  tried  to  bribe  him,  and  as  vainly  to 
bully  him.  He  had  been  assaulted,  his  life 
had  been  threatened,  and  altogether,  as  he 
admitted,  the  game  had  been  lively  enough 


The  Lost  Child 


143 


to  keep  him  interested ;  but  having  once 
won  the  game  he  tired  of  that  style  of  play 
altogether.  He  picked  out  a  small  but  choice 
practice  which 
permitted  him  to 
work  or  be  idle 
pretty  much  as  the 
fancy  took  him. 
These  were  two 
odd  chums  to  meet 
in  a  small  subur 
ban  town,  there  to 
lead  quiet  and  un 
eventful  lives,  and 
yet  they  wr  e  r  e 
the  two  most  con 
tented  men  in  the 
place. 

Halford   was 

getting  into  his  clothes,  but  really  with  a  speed 
and  precision  which  got  the  job  over  before  his 
impetuous  next-door  neighbor  had  got  one  leg 
of  his  riding-breeches  on.  Mrs.  Halford  sat  up 
in  bed  and  expressed  her  feeling  to  her  hus 
band,  who  had  never  been  known  to  express  his. 


144         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

"  Oh,  Jack,"  she  said,  "  isn't  it  awful  ? 
Would  you  ever  have  thought  of  such  a  thing! 
They  must  have  been  awfully  careless !  Oh, 
Jack,  you  will  find  him,  won't  you  ?  Jack,  if 
such  a  thing  happened  to  one  of  our  children 
I  should  go  wild;  I'll  never  get  over  it  myself 
if  he  isn't  found.  Oh,  you  don't  know  how 
thankful  I  am  that  we  didn't  lose  our  Richard 
that  way!  Oh,  Jack,  dear,  isn't  it  too  horrible 
for  anything !  " 

Jack  simply  responded,  with  no  trace  of 
emotion  in  his  voice : 

"  It's  the  hell!" 

And  yet  in  those  three  words  Jack  Hal  ford 
expressed,  in  his  own  way,  quite  as  much  as 
his  wife  had  expressed  in  hers.  More,  even, 
for  there  was  a  grim  promise  in  his  tone  that 
comforted  her  heart. 

Mrs.  Halford's  feelings  being  expressed  and 
in  some  measure  relieved,  she  promptly  be 
came  practical. 

"  I'll  fill  your  flask,  of  course,  dear.  Brandy, 
I  suppose  ?  And  what  shall  we  women  take 
up  to  the  Gun  Club  besides  blankets  and  clean 
clothes  ?" 


The  Lost  Child  145 

Mrs.  Halford 's  husband  always  thought 
before  he  spoke,  and  she  was  not  at  all  sur 
prised  that  he  filled  his  tobacco-pouch  before 
he  answered.  When  he  did  speak  he  knew 
what  he  had  to  say. 

First  something  to  put  in  my  pocket  for 
Dirck  and  me  to  eat.  We  can't  fool  with 
coming  home  to  breakfast.  Second,  tell  the 
girls  to  send  up  milk  to  the  Gun  Club,  and 
something  for  you  women  to  eat." 

Oh,  I  sha'n't  want  anything  to  eat,"  cried 
Mrs.  Halford. 

'  You  must  eat,"  said  her  husband,  simply, 
"  and  you  must  make  the  rest  of  them  eat. 
You  might  do  all  right  without  it,  but  I 
wouldn't  trust  the  rest  of  them.  You  may 
need  all  the  nerve  you've  got." 

Yes,  dear,"  said  his  wife,'  submissively. 
She  had  been  with  her  husband  in  times  of 
danger,  and  she  knew  he  was  a  leader  to  be 
followed.  '  I'll  have  sandwiches  and  coffee 
and  tea;  I  can  make  them  drink  tea,  anyway." 

'  Third,"  went  on  Jack  Halford,  as  if  he  had 
not  been  interrupted,  "  bring  my  field-glass 
with  you.  Dirck  and  I  will  range  together 


146         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

along  the  river.  If  I  put  up  a  white  hand 
kerchief  anywhere  down  there,  you  stay  where 
you  are  and  we  will  come  to  you.  If  I  put  up 
this  red  one,  come  right  down  with  blankets 
and  brandy  in  the  first  carriage  you  can  get 
hold  of.  Get  on  the  north  edge  of  the  hill  and 
you  can  keep  a  line  on  us  almost  anywhere." 

Couldn't  you  give  us  some  signal,  dear,  to 
tell  us  if — if — if  it's  all  ritjht  ?  " 

o 

If  it  was  all  wrong,"  replied  the  husband, 

you  wouldn't  want  the  mother  to  learn  it 
that  way.  I'll  signal  to  you  privately,  how 
ever.  If  it's  all  right,  I'll  wave  the  handker 
chief;  if  I  move  it  up  and  down,  you'll  under 
stand." 

Two  minutes  later  he  bade  her  good-by  at 
the  door. 

Now  remember,"  he  said,  "  white  means 
wait,  red  means  ride." 

And  having  delivered  himself  of  this  simple 
mnemonic  device,  he  passed  out  into  the  dark 
ness. 

At  the  next  gate  he  met  Dirck  and  the  two 
swung  into  step  together,  and  walked  up  the 
street  with  the  steady  stretching  tread  of  men 


The  Lost  Child  147 

accustomed  to  walking  long  distances.  They 
said  "  Hello!  "  as  they  met,  and  their  further 
conversation  was  brief. 

'  River,"  said  Halford;  "  what  do  you 
think  ?" 

4  River,  sure,"  said  the  other;  "a  lot  of 
those  younger  boys  have  been  taking  the 
youngsters  down  there  lately.  I  saw  that  kid 
down  there  last  week,  and  I'll  bet  a  dollar  his 
mother  would  swear  that  he'd  never  seen  the 
river." 

Then  we  won't  say  anything  about  it  to 
her,"  said  Halford,  and  they  reached  along  in 
silence. 

Before  them,  when  they  came  to  the  end  of 
the  road,  rose  a  hill  with  a  broad  plateau  on 
its  stomach.  Here  through  the  dull  haze  of 
the  morning  they  saw  smoky-orange  lights 
beginning  to  flicker  uncertainly  as  the  wind 
that  heralds  the  sunrise  came  fitfully  up.  The 
soft  wet  grass  under  their  feet  was  flecked 
with  little  grayish-silver  cobwebs,  and  here  and 
there  they  heard  the  morning  chirp  of  ground- 
nesting  birds.  As  they  went  farther  up  the 
hill  a  hum  of  voices  came  from  above;  the 


148         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

voices  of  people,  men  and  women,  mingled 
and  consonant  like  the  voices  of  the  birds,  but 
with  a  certain  tone  of  trouble  and  expectancy. 
Every  now  and  then  one  individual  voice  or 
another  would  dominate  the  general  murmur, 
and  would  be  followed  by  a  quick  flutter  of 
sound  denoting  acquiescence  or  disagreement. 
From  this  they  knew  that  most  of  their  neigh 
bors  had  arrived  before  them,  having  been 
summoned  earlier  in  the  journey  of  the  mes 
sengers  sent  out  from  the  distant  home  of  the 
lost  child. 

On  the  crown  of  the  hill  stood  a  curious 
structure,  actually  small,  but  looming  large  in 
the  grayness.  The  main  body  of  the  building 
was  elevated  upon  posts,  and  was  smaller  at 
the  bottom  than  where  the  spreading  walls 
met  the  peaked  roof.  This  roof  spread  out  on 
both  sides  into  broad  verandas,  and  under 
these  two  wing-like  shelters  some  three  or 
four  score  of  people  were  clustered  in  little 
groups.  Lanterns  and  hand-lamps  dimly  lit 
up  faces  that  showed  strange  in  the  unfamiliar 
illumination.  There  were  women  with  shawls 
over  their  shoulders  and  women  with  shawls 


The  Lost  Child 


149 


over  their  heads.      Some  of  the  men  were  in 
their  shirt-sleeves,  some  wore  shooting-coats, 


and  a  few  had  overcoats,  though  the  night  was 
warm.  But  no  stranger  arriving  on  the  scene 
could  have  taken  it  for  a  promiscuous  or  acci- 


1 50         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

dental  assemblage.  There  was  a  movement  in 
unison,  a  sympathetic  stir  throughout  the  little 
crowd  that  created  a  common  interest  and  a 
common  purpose.  The  arrival  of  the  two  men 
was  hailed  with  that  curious  sound  with  which 
such  a  gathering  greets  a  desired  and  attended 
accession— not  quite  the  sigh  of  relief,  but  the 
quick,  nervous  expulsion  of  the  breath  that 
tallies  the  coming  of  the  expected.  These 
were  two  of  the  men  to  be  counted  on,  and 
they  were  there. 

Every  little  community  such  as  this  knows 
its  leaders,  and  now  that  their  number  was 
complete,  the  women  drew  together  by  them 
selves  save  for  two  or  three  who  clearly  took 
equal  direction  with  the  men  ;  and  a  dozen  in 
all,  perhaps,  gathered  in  a  rough  circle  to  dis 
cuss  the  organization  of  the  search. 

It  was  a  brief  discussion.  A  majority  of  the 
members  of  the  group  had  formed  decided 
opinions  as  to  the  course  taken  by  the  wander 
ing  child,  and  thus  a  division  into  sub-groups 
came  about  at  once.  This  left  various  stretch 
ings  of  territory  uncovered,  and  these  were 
assigned  to  those  of  the  more  decided  minor- 


The  Lost  Child  151 

ity  who  were  best  acquainted  with  the  particu 
lar  localities.  When  the  division  of  labor  was 
completed,  the  men  had  arranged  to  start  out 
in  such  directions  as  would  enable  them  to 
range  and  view  the  whole  countryside  for  the 
extreme  distance  of  radius  to  which  it  was  sup 
posed  the  boy  could  possibly  have  travelled. 
The  assignment  of  Halford  and  Dirck  to  the 
river  course  was  prompt,  for  it  was  known  that 
they  habitually  hunted  and  fished  along  that 
line.  The  father  of  the  boy,  who  stood  by, 
was  reminded  of  this  fact,  for  a  curious  and 
doubtful  look  came  into  his  face  when  he 
heard  two  of  the  most  active  and  energetic 
men  in  the  town  set  aside  to  search  a  region 
where  he  had  no  idea  that  his  boy  could  have 
strayed.  Some  excuse  was  given  also  for  the 
detailing  of  two  other  men  of  equal  ability  to 
take  the  range  immediately  above  the  river 
bank,  and  within  hailing  distance  of  those  in 
the  marshes  by  the  shore.  Had  his  mind  not 
been  in  the  daze  of  mortal  grief  and  perplexity, 
he  would  have  grasped  the  sinister  significance 
of  this  precaution  ;  but  he  accepted  it  in  dull 
and  hopeless  confidence.  When  after  they 


1 5  2          Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

had  set  forth  he  told  his  wife  of  the  arrange 
ments  made,  and  she  heard  the  names  of  the 
four  men  who  had  been  appointed  to  work 
near  the  riverside,  she  pulled  the  faded  old 
Paisley  shawl  (that  the 
child's  n  u  r  s  e  h  a  d 
w  r  a  p  p  e  d  about  her) 
across  her  swollen  eyes, 
and  moaned,  "The  river, 
the  river — oh,  my  boy, 
my  boy!  " 

Perhaps  the  men  heard 
her,  for  being  all  in 
place  to  take  their  several  directions,  they 
made  a  certain  broken  start  and  were  off  into 
the  darkness  at  the  base  of  the  hill,  before  the 
two  or  three  of  their  sex  who  were  left  in 
charge  of  the  women  had  fairly  given  the 
word.  The  tramp  of  men's  feet  and  horses' 
hoofs  died  down  into  the  shadowy  distance. 
The  women  went  inside  the  spacious  old  corn- 
crib  that  had  been  turned  into  a  gun-club 
shooting-box,  and  there  the  mother  laid  her 
face  on  the  breast  of  her  best  friend,  and  clung 
to  her  without  a  sound,  only  shuddering  once 


The  Lost  Child  153 

and  again,  and  holding  her  with  a  convulsive 
grip.  The  other  women  moved  around,  and 
busied  themselves  with  little  offices,  like  the 
making  of  tea  and  the  trimming  of  lamps,  and 
talked  among  each  other  in  a  quiet  way  with 
the  odd  little  upward  inflections  with  which 
women  simulate  cheerfulness  and  hope,  telling 
tales  of  children  who  had  been  lost  and  had 
been  found  again  all  safe  and  unscathed,  and 
praising  the  sagacity  and  persistence  of  certain 
of  the  men  engaged  in  the  search.  Mr.  Lati- 
mer,  they  said,  was  almost  like  a  detective,  he 
had  such  an  instinct  for  finding  things  and  peo 
ple.  Mr.  Brown  knew  every  field  and  hollow  on 
the  Brookfield  Road.  Mr.  MacDonald  could 
see  just  as  well  in  the  darkness  as  in  the  day 
time  ;  and  all  the  talk  that  reached  the  mother's 
ears  was  of  this  man's  skill  of  woodcraft,  of 
that  man's  knowledge  of  the  country,  or  of 
another's  unfailing  cleverness  or  tirelessness. 

Outside,  the  two  or  three  men  in  charge 
stood  by  the  father  in  their  own  way.  It  had 
been  agreed  that  he  should  wait  at  the  hilltop 
to  learn  if  a  trail  had  been  found.  He  was  a 
good  fellow,  but  not  helpful  or  capable ;  and 


154         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

it  was  their  work  to  "jolly"  him,  as  they 
called  it;  to  keep  his  hope  up  with  cheering 
suggestions,  and  with  occasional  judicious 
doses  of  whiskey  from  their  flasks.  For  them 
selves,  they  did  not  drink ;  though  their  voices 
were  low  and  steady  they  were  more  nervous 
than  the  poor  sufferer  they  guarded,  numbed 
and  childish  in  his  awful  grief  and  apprehen 
sion.  They  were  waiting  for  the  sounds  of 
the  beginning  of  the  search  far  below,  and 
presently  these  sounds  came,  or  rather  one 
sound,  a  hollow  noise,  changeful,  uneven,  yet 
of  a  cruel  monotony.  It  was  a  cry  of  "  Willy! 
Willy!  Willy!"  rising  out  of  that  gray-black 
depth,  a  cry  of  many  voices,  a  cry  that  came 
from  far  and  near,  a  cry  at  which  the  women 
huddled  closer  together  and  pressed  each 
other's  hands,  and  looked  speechless  love  and 
pity  at  the  woman  who  lay  upon  her  best 
friend's  breast,  clutching  it  tighter  and  tighter. 
Of  the  men  outside,  the  father  leaned  forward 
and  clutched  the  arm  of  his  chair.  The  others 
saw  the  great  drops  of  sweat  roll  from  his 
brow,  and  they  turned  their  faces  away  from 
him  and  swore  inaudibly. 


The  Lost  Child 


155 


Then,  as  the  deep  below  began  to  be  alive 
with  a  faint  dim  light  reflected  from  the  half 
awakened  heaven,  the  voices  died  away  in  the 
distance,  and  in  their  place  the  leaves  of  the 


Great  trees  rustled  and  the  birds  twittered  to 


the  coming  morn. 


The  clay  broke  with  the  dull  red  that  prophe 
sies  heat.  As  the  hours  wore  on  the  prophecy 
was  fulfilled.  The  moisture  of  the  dew  and 


156         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

the  river  mist  rose  toward  the  hot  sky  and 
vanished,  but  the  dry  haze  remained  and  the 
low  sun  shone  through  it  with  a  peculiar  diffu 
sion  of  coppery  light.  Even  when  it  reached 
the  zenith,  the  warm,  faintly  yellow  dimness 
still  rose  high  above  the  horizon,  throwing  its 
soft  spell  upon  all  objects  far  or  near,  and 
melting  through  the  dim  blue  on  the  distant 
hilltop  into  the  hot  azure  of  the  great  dome 
above. 

For  an  hour  the  watchers  on  the  hill  re 
mained  undisturbed,  talking  in  undertones. 
For  the  most  part,  they  speculated  on  the 
significance  of  the  faint  sounds  that  came  up 
from  below.  Sometimes  they  could  trace  the 
crash  of  a  horse  through  dry  underbrush; 
sometimes  a  tumultuous  clamor  of  command 
ing  voices  \vould  tell  them  that  a  flat  boat  was 
being  worked  across  a  broad  creek  or  a  pond ; 
sometimes  a  hardly  audible  whirr,  and  the 
metallic  clinking  of  a  bicycle  bell  would  tell 
them  that  the  wheelmen  were  speeding  on  the 
search.  But  for  the  best  part  of  the  time  only 
nature's  harmony  of  sounds  came  up  through 
the  ever-lightening  gloom. 


The  Lost  CJiild  157 

But  with  the  first  of  daylight  came  the  neigh 
bors  who  had  not  been  summoned,  and  they, 
of  course,  came  running.  It  was  also  notice 
able  of  this  contingent  that  their  attire  was 
somewhat  studied,  and  showed  more  or  less 
elaborate  preparation  for  starting  on  the 
already  started  hunt.  Noticeable  also  it  was, 
that  after  much  sagacious  questioning  and  pro 
foundly  wise  discussion,  the  most  of  the  new 
comers  either  hung  about  peering  out  into  the 
dawn  and  making  startling  discoveries  at  vari 
ous  points,  or  else  went  back  to  their  houses 
to  get  bicycles,  or  horses,  or  forgotten  sus 
penders.  The  little  world  of  a  suburban  town 
sorts  itself  out  pretty  quickly  and  pretty 
surely.  There  are  the  men  who  do  and  the 
men  who  don't;  and  very  few  of  the  men  who 
did,  in  that  particular  town,  were  in  bed  half 
an  hour  after  the  loss  of  that  child  was  known. 

But,  after  all,  the  late  arrivals  were  useful  in 
their  way,  and  their  wives,  who  came  along 
later,  were  still  more  useful.  The  men  were 
fertile  in  suggestions  for  tempting  and  practi 
cable  breakfasts;  and  the  women  actually 
brought  the  food  along;  and  by  the  time  that 


158         Jersey  Street  arid  Jersey  Lane 

the  world  was  well  alight,  the  early  risers  were 
bustling  about  and  serving  coffee  and  tea,  and 
biscuits  and  fruit,  and  keeping  up  that  sem 
blance  of  activity  and  employment  that  alone 
can  carry  poor  humanity  through  long  periods 
of  suspense  and  anxiety.  And  the  first  on  the 
field  were  the  last  to  eat  and  the  least  critical 
of  their  fare. 

It  was  eight  o'clock  when  the  first  party  of 
searchers  returned  to  the  hill.  There  were 
eight  of  them.  They  stopped  a  little  below  the 
crib  and  beckoned  to  Pcnrhyn  to  come  down 
to  them.  He  went,  white-faced  and  a  little 
unsteady  on  his  feet ;  his  guardians  followed 
him  and  joined  with  the  group  in  a  busy  seri 
ous  talk  that  lasted  perhaps  five  minutes — but 
vastly  longer  to  the  women  who  watched  them 
from  above.  Then  Pcnrhyn  and  two  men 
went  hastily  down  the  hill,  and  the  others 
came  up  to  the  crib  and  eagerly  accepted  the 
offer  of  a  hasty  breakfast. 

They  had  little  to  tell,  and  that  little  only 
served  to  deepen  the  doubt  and  trouble  of 
the  hour.  Of  all  the  complication  of  unkind 
chance  the  searchers  had  to  face  the  worst  and 


The  Lost  CJiild  159 

the  most  puzzling.  As  in  many  towns  of  old 
settlement  a  road  ran  around  the  town,  roughly 
circumscribing  it,  much  as  the  boulevards  of 
Paris  anciently  circumscribed  the  old  fortifi 
cations  of  the  city.  It  was  little  more  than 
a  haphazard  connection  of  roads,  lanes,  and 
avenues,  each  one  of  which  had  come  into 
existence  to  serve  some  particular  end,  and 
the  connection  had  ended  in  forming  a  circuit 
that  practically  defined  the  town  limits.  It 
had  been  made  certain  that  the  boy  had  wan 
dered  this  whole  round,  and  that  he  had  not 
left  it  by  any  one  of  the  converging  roads 
which  he  must  have  crossed.  Nor  could  the 
direction  of  his  wandering  be  ascertained.  The 
hard,  dry  macadam  road,  washed  clean  by  a 
recent  rainfall,  showed  no  trace  of  his  light, 
infantile  footprints.  But  sure  it  was  that  he 
had  been  on  the  road  not  one  hour,  but  two 
or  three  at  least,  and  that  he  had  started  out 
with  an  armful  of  his  tiny  belongings.  Here 
they  had  found  his  small  pocket-handkerchief, 
there  a  gray  giraffe  from  his  Noah's  ark;  in 
another  place  a  noseless  doll  that  had  de 
scended  to  him  from  his  eldest  sister;  then  a 


160         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

top  had  been  found — a  top  that  he  could  not 
have  spun  for  years  to  come.  Would  the 
years  ever  come  when  that  lost  boy  should 
spin  tops  ? 

There  were  other  little  signs  which  attested 
his  passage  around  the  circle — freshly  broken 
stalks  of  milkweed,  shreds  of  his  brightly  fig 
ured  cotton  dress  on  the  thorns  of  the  wayside 
blackberries,  and  even  in  one  place  the  clear 
print  of  a  muddy  and  bloody  little  hand  on  a 
white  gate-post. 

There  is  no  search  more  difficult  than  a 
search  for  a  lost  child  five  or  six  years  of  age. 
We  are  apt  to  think  of  these  wee  ones  as 
feeble  creatures,  and  we  forget  that  their 
physical  strength  is  proportionally  much 
greater  than  that  of  grown-up  people.  We 
forget  also  that  the  child  has  not  learned  to 

t~> 

attribute  sensations  of  physical  discomfort  to 
their  proper  sources.  The  child  knows  that  it 
suffers,  but  it  does  not  know  why.  It  is  con 
scious  of  a  something  wrong,  but  the  little 
brain  is  often  unable  to  tell  whether  that 
something  be  weariness  or  hunger.  If  the 
wandering  spirit  be  upon  it,  it  wanders  to  the 


The  Lost  Child  161 

last  limit  of  physical  power,  and  it  is  surpris 
ing  indeed  to  find  how  long  it  is  before  that 
limit  is  reached.  A  healthy,  muscular  infant 
of  this  age  has  been  known  to  walk  nearly 
eight  or  ten  miles  before  becoming  utterly 
exhausted.  And  when  exhaustion  comes, 
and  the  tiny  form  falls  in  its  tracks,  how  small 
an  object  it  is  to  detect  in  the  great  world  of 
outdoors!  A  little  bundle  of  dusty  garments 
in  a  ditch,  in  a  wayside  hollow,  in  tall  grass, 
or  amoii";  the  tufts  and  hummocks  of  a  marsh 

t> 

— how  easy  it  is  for  so  inconspicuous  an  object 
to  escape  the  eye  of  the  most  zealous  searcher! 
A  young  animal  lost  cries  incessantly;  the  lost 
child  cries  out  his  pitiful  little  cry,  finds  itself 
lifted  to  no  tender  bosom,  soothed  by  no  gen 
tle  voice,  and  in  the  end  wanders  and  suffers 
in  helpless,  hopeless  silence. 

As  the  morning  wore  on  Dirck  and  Halford 
beat  the  swampy  lands  of  the  river-side  with  a 
thoroughness  that  showed  their  understanding 
of  the  difficulty  of  their  work,  and  their  con 
viction  that  the  child  had  taken  that  direction. 
This  conviction  deepened  with  every  hour,  for 
the  rest  of  the  countryside  was  fairly  open  and 
ii 


1 62         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

well  populated,  and  there  the  search  should 
have  been,  for  such  a  search,  comparatively 
easy.  Yet  the  sun  climbed  higher  and  higher 
in  the  sky,  and  no  sound  of  guns  fired  in  glad 
signal  reached  their  ears.  Hither  and  thither 
they  went  through  the  hot  lowlands,  meeting 
and  parting  again,  with  appointments  to  come 
together  in  spots  known  to  them  both,  or 
separating  without  a  word,  each  knowing  well 
where  their  courses  would  bring  them  together. 
From  time  to  time  they  caught  glimpses  of 
their  companions  on  the  hills  above,  who,  from 
their  height,  could  see  the  place  of  meeting  on 
the  still  higher  hill,  and  each  time  they  sig 
nalled  the  news  and  got  back  the  despairing 
sign  that  meant  "  None  yet!  " 

News  enough  there  was,  but  not  tJie  news. 
Mrs.  Penrhyn  still  stayed,  for  her  own  house 
was  so  situated  that  the  child  could  not  pos 
sibly  return  to  it,  if  he  had  taken  the  direction 
that  now  seemed  certain,  without  passing 
through  the  crowd  of  searchers,  and  intelli 
gence  of  his  discovery  must  reach  her  soonest 
at  that  point.  Perhaps  there  was  another  rea 
son,  too.  Perhaps  she  could  not  bear  to 


The  Lost  Child  163 

return  to  that  silent  house,  where  every  room 
held  some  reminder  of  her  loss.  Certainly  she 
remained  at  the  Club,  and  perhaps  she  got  some 
unreasoning  comfort  out  of  the  rumors  and 
reports  that  came  to  that  spot  from  every  side. 
It  was  but  the  idle  talk  that  springs  up  and 
flies  about  on  such  occasions,  but  now  and 
then  it  served  as  a  straw  for  her  drowning 
hope  to  clutch  at.  Word  would  come  of  a 
farmer  who  had  seen  a  strange  child  in  his 
neighbor's  wagon.  Then  would  come  a  story 
of  an  inn-keeper  who  had  driven  into  town  to 
ask  if  anybody  had  lost  a  boy.  Then  some 
body  would  bring  a  report  at  third  or  fourth 
hand  of  a  child  rescued  alive  from  the  river. 
Of  course  story  after  story,  report  after  report, 
came  to  nothing.  The  child  seen  in  the  wagon 
was  a  girl  of  fourteen.  The  inn-keeper  had 
come  to  town  to  ask  about  the  lost  child,  but 
it  was  only  because  he  had  heard  the  report 
and  was  curious.  A  child  indeed  had  been 
rescued  from  the  river,  but  the  story  was  a 
week  old.  And  so  it  went,  and  the  hot  sun 
rose  to  the  zenith  and  declined,  and  the  cop 
pery  haze  grew  dim,  and  the  shadows  length- 


164         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

ened,   and  the  late  afternoon  was   come    with 
its  awful  threat  of  impending  night. 

Dirck   and    Hal  ford,    clown   in    the    riverside 
marsh,  saw  that   dreaded   change  fall  upon  the 


landscape,  and  they  paused  in  their  search  and 
looked  at  one  another  silently.  They  had  been 
ceaselessly  at  work  all  clay,  and  the  work  had 
left  its  marks  on  them.  Their  faces  were  burnt 
to  a  fiery  reel,  they  were  torn  and  scratched  in 
the  brambles,  their  clothes  were  soaked  in 
mud  and  water  to  the  waist,  and  they  had 


The  Lost  Child  165 

been  bitten  and  stung  by  insects  until  they 
looked  as  though  some  strange  fever  had 
broken  out  on  them. 

They  had  just  met  after  a  long  beat,  each 
having  described  the  half  of  a  circle  around  a 

o 

piece  of  open  water,  and  had  sunk  down  in 
utter  weariness  on  a  little  patch  of  dry  ground, 
and  for  a  minute  looked  at  each  other  in 
silence.  Then  the  younger  man  spoke. 

'  Hal,"  he  said,  "  he  never  came  this  far." 

By  way  of  answer  the  other  drew  from  his 
pocket  a  child's  shoe,  worn  and  wet,  and  held 
it  up. 

Where  did  you  find  it  ?  "   asked  Dirck. 
Right   over  there,"    said   Hal  ford,    "  near 
that  old  wagon-trail." 

Dirck  looked  at  him  with  a  question  in  his 
eyes,  which  found  its  answer  in  the  grave 
inclination  of  the  elder's  head.  Then  Dirck 
shook  his  own  head  and  whistled — one  long, 
low,  significant  whistle. 

Well,"    he    said,    "'  I    thought    so.       Any 
trail  ?" 

M  Not  the  least,"  replied  Halford.  "  There's 
a  strip  of  thick  salt  grass  there,  over  two  yards 


1 66         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

wide,  and  I  found  the  shoe  right  in  the  middle 
of  it.  It  was  lying  on  its  side  when  I  found 
it,  not  caught  in  the  grass." 

Then  they  were  carrying  him,  sure,"  said 
Dirck,  decisively.  "  Now  then,  the  question 
is,  which  way. 

The  two  men  went  over  to  the  abandoned 
roadway,  a  mere  trail  of  ruts,  where,  in  years 
before,  ox-teams  had  hauled  salt  hay.  Up 
and  down  the  long  strip  of  narrow  grass  that 
bordered  it,  they  went  backward  and  forward, 
hunting  for  traces  of  men's  feet,  for  they  knew 
by  this  time,  almost  beyond  doubt,  that  the 
child  was  in  the  hands  of  tramps.  The 
"tramp-hole"  is  an  institution  in  all  subur 
ban  regions  which  are  bordered  by  stretches 
of  wild  and  unfrequented  country.  These 
tramp-holes  or  camps  are  the  headquarters  of 
bands  of  wanderers  who  come  year  after  year 
to  dwell  sometimes  for  a  week,  sometimes  for 
months.  The  same  spot  is  always  occupied, 
and  there  seems  to  be  an  understanding  among 
all  the  bands  that  the  original  territory  shall 
not  be  exceeded.  The  tramps  who  establish 
these  "holes"  are  invariably  professionals, 


The  Lost  Child 


167 


and  never  casual  vagabonds;  and  apparently 
they  make  it  a  point  of  honor  to  conduct 
themselves  with  a  certain  propriety  while  they 


are  in  camp.  Curiously  enough,  too,  they 
seem  to  come  to  the  tramp-hole,  mainly  for 
the  purpose  of  doing  what  it  is  supposed  that 
a  tramp  never  does,  namely:  washing  them 
selves  and  their  clothes.  I  have  seen  on  a 
chill  November  day,  in  one  of  these  places, 
half  a  dozen  men,  naked  to  the  waist,  scrub- 


1 68         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

bing  themselves,  or  drying  their  wet  shirts 
before  the  fire.  I  have  always  found  them 
perfectly  peaceable,  and  I  have  never  known 
them  to  accost  lonely  passers-by,  or  women  or 
children.  If  a  shooting  or  fishing  party  comes 
along,  however,  large  enough  to  put  any  accu 
sation  of  terrorism  out  of  the  question,  it  is 
not  uncommon  for  the  "hoboes"  to  make  a 
polite  suggestion  that  the  poor  man  would  be 
the  better  for  his  beer;  and  so  well  is  the 
reputation  of  these  queer  camps  established  that 
the  applicant  generally  receives  such  a  collec 
tion  of  five-cent  pieces  as  will  enable  him  to  get 
a  few  quarts  for  himself  and  his  companions. 

Still,  in  spite  of  the  mysterious  system  of 
government  that  sways  these  banded  wander 
ers  on  the  face  of  the  earth,  it  happens  occa 
sionally  that  the  tramp  of  uncontrollable 
instincts  finds  his  way  into  the  tramp-hole, 
and  there,  if  his  companions  are  not  numerous 
or  strong  enough  to  withstand  him,  commits 
some  outrage  that  excites  popular  indignation 
and  leads  to  the  utter  abolition  of  one  of  the 
few  poor  out-door  homes  that  the  tramp  can 
call  his  own,  by  the  grace  and  indulgence  of 


The  Lost  Child  169 

the  world  of  workers.  That  such  a  thing  had 
happened  now  the  two  searchers  for  the  lost 
child  feared  with  an  unspeakable  fear. 

Dirck  straightened  himself  up  after  a  careful 
inspection  of  the  strip  of  salt  grass  turf,  and 
looking  up  at  the  ridge,  blew  a  loud,  shrill 
whistle  on  his  two  fingers.  There  was  no 
answer.  They  had  gone  a  full  mile  beyond 
call  of  their  followers. 

"  I'll  tell  you  what,  old  man/'  said  Dirck, 
with  the  light  of  battle  coming  into  his  young 
eyes,  "  we'll  do  this  thing  ourselves."  His 
senior  smiled,  but  even  as  he  smiled  he  knit 
his  brows. 

"  I'll  go  you,  my  boy,"  he  said,  "  so  far  as 
to  look  them  up  at  the  canal-boats.  If  they 
are  not  there  we've  got  to  go  back  and  start 
the  rest  off.  It  may  be  a  question  of  horses, 
and  it  may  be  a  question  of  telegraphing." 

"  Well,  let's  have  one  go  at  them,  anyway," 
said  Dirck.  He  was  no  less  tender-hearted 
than  his  companion ;  he  wanted  to  find  the 
child,  but  also  he  wanted,  being  young  and 
strong  and  full  of  fight,  to  hunt  tramps. 


1 70         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

There  were  three  tramp-holes  by  the  river 
side,  but  two  were  sheltered  hollows  used  only 
in  the  winter-time.  The  third  was  a  collec 
tion  of  abandoned  canal-boats  on  the  muddy 
strand  of  the  river.  Most  of  them  were  hope 
less  wrecks;  in  three  or  four  a  few  patches  of 
deck  remained,  enough  to  afford  lodgment 
and  shelter  to  the  reckless  wayfarers  who  made 
nothing  of  sleeping  close  to  the  polluted  waters 
that  permeated  the  rotten  hulks  with  foul 
stains  and  fouler  smells. 

From  the  largest  of  these  long,  clumsy  car 
casses  of  boats  came  a  sound  of  muffled  laugh 
ter.  The  two  searchers  crept  softly  up, 
climbed  noiselessly  to  the  deck  and  looked 
down  the  hatchway.  The  low,  red  sun 
poured  in  through  a  window  below  them,  leav 
ing  them  in  shadow  and  making  a  picture  in 
red  light  and  black  shades  of  the  strange  group 
below. 

Surrounded  by  ten  tramps;  ten  dirty,  un 
couth,  unshaven  men  of  the  road,  sat  the  little 
Pcnrhyn  boy,  his  little  night-shirt  much  travel- 
stained  and  torn,  his  fat  legs  scratched  and 
bruised,  his  soiled  cheeks  showing  the  traces  of 


The  Lost  Child  171 

tears,  his  lips  dyed  with  the  juices  of  the  ber 
ries  he  had  eaten  on  his  way,  but  happy, 
happy,  happy — happier  perhaps  than  he  had 
ever  been  in  his  life  before ;  for  in  his  hand 
he  held  a  clay  pipe  which  he  made  persistent 
efforts  to  smoke,  while  one  of  the  men,  a  big 
black-bearded  animal  who  wore  three  coats, 
one  on  top  of  the  other,  gently  withdrew  it 
from  his  lips  each  time  that  the  smoke  grew 
dangerously  thick.  And  the  whole  ten  of 
them,  sitting  around  him  in  their  rags  and  dirt, 
cheered  him  and  petted  him  and  praised  him, 
even  as  no  polite  assemblage  had  ever  wor 
shipped  him  before.  No  food,  no  drink  could 
have  been  so  acceptable  to  that  delicately  nur 
tured  child  of  the  house  of  Penrhyn  as  the 
rough  admiration  of  those  ten  tramps.  What 
ever  terrors,  sufferings,  or  privations  he  had 
been  through  were  all  forgotten,  and  he 
crowed  and  shrieked  with  hysterical  laughter. 
And  when  his  two  rescuers  dropped  down  into 
the  hole,  instead  of  welcoming  them  with  joy, 
he  grabbed  one  of  the  collars  of  the  big  brute 
with  the  three  coats  and  wept  in  dire  disap 
pointment  and  affright. 


1/2         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

"  Fore  God,  boss!"  said  the  spokesman  of 
the  gang,  tlie  sweat  standing  out  on  his  brow, 
"  we  didn't  mean  him  no  harm,  and  we 
wouldn't  have  done  him  no  harm  neither.  \\V 
found  de  little  blokey  over  der  in  the  ma'sli 
yonder,  and  we  tuk  him  in  and  fed  him  de 
best  we  could.  We  was  goin'  to  take  him  up 
to  the  man  what  keeps  the  gin-mill  up  the  river 
there,  for  we  hadn't  no  knowledge  where  he 
come  from,  and  we  didn't  want  to  get  none  of 
you  folks  down  on  us.  I  know  we  oughter 
have  took  him  up  two  hours  ago,  but  he  was 
foolin'  that  funny-like  that  we  all  got  kinder 
stuck  on  it,  sec,  and  we  kinder  didn't  want  to 
shake  him.  That's  all  there  was  to  it,  boss. 
God  in  heaven  be  my  judge,  I  ain't  lyin',  and 
that's  the  truth!  " 

The  faces  of  the  ten  tramps  could  not  turn 
white,  but  they  did  show  an  ashen  fear  under 
their  eyes — a  deadly  fear  of  the  two  men  for 
whom  any  one  of  them  would  have  been  more 
than  a  match,  but  who  represented  the  world 
from  which  they  were  outcasts,  the  world  of 
Home,  of  whose  most  precious  sweetness  they 
had  stolen  an  hour's  enjoyment — the  world  so 


The  Lost  Child 


173 


strong  and   terrible  to  avenge  a  wrong  to   its 
best  beloved. 

Then  the  silence  was  broken  by  the  voice  of 
the  child,  wailing  piteously: 


"  I  don't  want  to   be   tooken   away  from  the 
raggedty  gentlemen  !  " 

Dirck  still  looked  suspicious  as  he  took  the 


1/4         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

weeping  child,  but  Halford  smiled  grimly, 
thoughtfully  and  sadly,  as  he  put  his  hand  in 
his  pocket  and  said:  "  I  guess  it's  all  right, 
boys,  but  I  think  you'd  better  get  away  for 
the  present.  Take  this  and  get  over  the  river 
and  out  of  the  county.  The  people  have  been 
searching  for  this  baby  all  clay,  and  I  don't 
know  whether  they'll  listen  to  my  friend  and 
me." 

The  level  red  light  had  left  the  valleys  and 
low  places,  and  lit  alone  the  hilltop  where  the 
mother  was  watching,  when  a  great  shout  came 
out  of  the  darkness,  spreading  from  voice  to 
voice  through  the  great  expanse  below,  and 
echoed  wildly  from  above,  thrilling  men's 
blood  and  making  hearts  stand  still ;  and  as  it 
rose  and  swelled  and  grew  toward  her  out  of 
the  darkness,  the  mother  knew  that  her  lost 
child  was  found. 


A   LETTER   TO   TOWN 


A   LETTER   TO   TOWN 

FERNSEED  STATION, 

ATLANTIS  Co.,  NEW  

February  30,  189-. 

MY  DEAR  MODESTUS:— You  write 
me  that  circumstances  have  decided 
you  to  move  your  household  from  New  York 
to  some  inexpensively  pleasant  town,  village, 
or  hamlet  in  the  immediate  neighborhood,  and 
you  ask  me  the  old,  old  innocent  question  : 

"  Shall  I  like  suburban  life  ?" 

This  question  I  can  answer  most  frankly  and 
positively : 

"  No,  certainly  not.  You  will  not  like  it  at 
all." 

There  is  no  such  thing  as  liking  a  country 
life — for  I  take  it  that  you  mean  to  remove  to 
the  real  suburban  countryside,  and  not  to  one 

12 


1 78         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

of  those  abominable  and  abhorrent  deserts  of 
paved  streets  laid  out  at  right  angles,  and  all 
supplied  with  sewers  and  electric  light  wires 
and  water-mains  before  the  first  lonely  house 
escapes  from  the  house-pattern  books  to  tempt 
the  city  dweller  out  to  that  dreary,  soulless 
waste  which  has  all  the  modern  improvements 
and  not  one  tree.  I  take  it,  I  say,  that  you 
are  going  to  no  such  cheap  back-extension  of 
a  great  city,  but  that  you  are  really  going 
among  the  trees  and  the  water-courses,  sever 
ing  all  ties  with  the  town,  save  the  railway's 
glittering  lines  of  steel — or,  since  I  have 
thought  of  it,  I  might  as  well  say  the  railway 
ties. 

If  that  is  what  your  intent  is,  and  you  carry 
it  out  firmly,  you  are  going  to  a  life  which  you 
can  never  like,  but  which  you  may  learn  to 
love. 

How  should  it  be  possible  that  you  should 
enjoy  taking  up  a  new  life,  with  new  surround 
ings,  new  anxieties,  new  responsibilities,  new 
duties,  new  diversions,  new  social  connections 
— new  conditions  of  every  kind — after  living 
half  a  lifetime  in  New  York  ?  It  is  true  that, 


A  Letter  to   Toivn  179 

being  a  born  New  Yorker,  you  know  very 
little  indeed  of  the  great  city  you  live  in.  You 
know  the  narrow  path  you  tread,  coming  and 
going,  from  your  house  to  your  office,  and 
from  your  office  to  your  house.  It  follows,  as 
closely  as  it  may,  the  line  of  Broadway  and 
Fifth  Avenue.  The  elevated  railroads  bound 
it  downtown ;  and  uptown  fashion  has  drawn  a 
line  a  few  hundred  yards  on  either  side,  which 
you  have  only  to  cross,  to  east  or  to  west,  to 
find  a  strange  exposition  of  nearsightedness 
come  upon  your  friends.  Here  and  there  you 
do,  perhaps,  know  some  little  by-path  that 
leads  to  a  club  or  a  restaurant,  or  to  a  place  of 
amusement.  After  a  number  of  books  have 
been  written  at  you,  you  have  ventured  timo 
rously  and  feebly  into  such  unknown  lands  as 
Greenwich  Village;  or  that  poor,  shabby, 
elbowing  stretch  of  territory  that  used  to  be 
interesting,  in  a  simple  way,  when  it  was 
called  the  French  Quarter.  It  is  now  sup 
posed  to  be  the  Bohemian  Quarter,  and  rising 
young  artists  invite  parties  of  society-ladies  to 
go  down  to  its  table  d'hote  restaurants,  and  see 
the  desperate  young  men  of  the  bachelor-apart- 


180         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

merits   smoke   cigarettes  and   drink    California 
claret  without  a  sign  of  trepidation. 

As  I  say,  that   is   pretty  near  all   you   know 
of  the  great,  marvellous,  multitudinous  town 


ijjf  i.  — fc  '    r — "  I 

i*f|lil 

-J  J 


you  live  in — a  city  full  of  strange  people,  of 
strange  occupations,  of  strange  habits  of  life, 
of  strange  contrasts  of  wealth  and  poverty ;  of  a 
new  life  of  an  indescribable  crudity,  and  of  an 


A  Letter  to   Town  181 

old  life  that  breeds  to-day  the  very  atmosphere 
of  the  historic  past.  Your  feet  have  never 
strayed  in  the  side  paths  where  you  might 
have  learned  something  of  the  infinite  and 
curious  strangeness  of  this  strange  city. 

But,  after  all,  this  is  neither  here  nor  there. 
You  have  accustomed  yourself  to  the  narrow 
dorsal  strip  that  is  all  New  York  to  you. 
Therein  are  contained  the  means  of  meeting 

o 

your  every  need,  and  of  gratifying  your  every 
taste.  There  are  your  shops,  your  clubs,  your 
libraries,  your  schools,  your  theatres,  your  art- 
galleries,  and  the  houses  of  all  your  friends, 
except  a  few  who  have  ventured  a  block  or  so 
outside  of  that  magic  line  that  I  spoke  of  a 
little  while  ago.  And  now  you  are  not  only 
going  to  cross  that  line  yourself,  but  to  pass 
the  fatal  river  beyond  it,  to  burn  your  boats 
behind  you,  and  to  settle  in  the  very  wilder 
ness.  And  you  ask  me  if  you  will  like  it ! 

No,  Modestus,  you  will  not.  You  have 
made  up  your  mind,  of  course,  to  the  tedium 
of  the  two  railway  journeys  every  weekday, 
and  when  you  have  made  friends  with  your 
fellow-commuters,  you  will  get  to  like  it,  for 


1 82         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

your  morning  trip  in  will  take  the  place  with 
you  of  your  present  afternoon  call  at  your 
club.  And  you  are  pretty  sure  to  enjoy  the 
novelty  of  the  first  few  months.  You  have 
moved  out  in  the  spring,  and,  dulled  as  your 
perceptions  are  by  years  of  city  life,  you  can 
not  fail  to  be  astonished  and  thrilled,  and  per 
haps  a  little  bit  awed,  at  the  wonder  of  that 
green  awakening.  And  when  you  see  how  the 
first  faint,  seemingly  half-doubtful  promise  of 
perfect  growth  is  fulfilled  by  the  procession  of 
the  months,  you  yourself  will  be  moved  with 
the  desire  to  work  this  miracle,  and  to  make 
plants  and  flowers  grow  at  your  own  will.  You 
will  begin  to  talk  of  what  you  are  going  to  do 
next  year — for  you  have  taken  a  three  years' 
lease,  I  trust — if  only  as  an  evidence  of  good 
faith.  You  will  lay  out  a  tract  for  your  flower 
garden  and  your  vegetable  garden,  and  you 
will  borrow  your  neighbor's  seed-catalogue, 
and  you  \vill  plan  out  such  a  garden  as  never 
blossomed  since  Eden. 

And  in  your  leisure  days,  of  course,  you  will 
enjoy  it  more  or  less.  You  will  sit  on  your 
broad  veranda  in  the  pleasant  mornings  and 


A  Letter  to    Town  183 

listen  to  the  wind  softly  brushing  the  tree-tops 
to  and  fro,  and  look  at  the  blue  sky  through 
the  leaf-framed  spaces  in  the  cool,  green 
canopy  above  you ;  and  as  you  remember  the 


cruel,  hot,  lifeless  days  of  summer  in  your 
town  house,  when  you  dragged  through  the 
weeks  of  work  that  separated  you  from  the 
wife  and  children  at  the  sea-side  or  in  the 
mountains — then,  Modestus,  you  must  look 
upon  what  is  before  you,  and  say:  it  is  good. 


1 84         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

It  is  true  that  you  can't  get  quite  used  to 
the  sensation  of  wearing  your  tennis  flannels 
at  your  own  domestic  breakfast  table,  and  you 
cannot  help  feeling  as  if  somebody  had  stolen 
your  clothes,  and  you  were  going  around  in 
your  pajamas.  But  presently  your  friend — for 
of  course  you  have  followed  the  trail  of  a 
friend,  in  choosing  your  new  abode — your 
friend  drops  in  clad  likewise,  and  you  take  the 
children  and  start  off  for  a  stroll.  As  the 
pajama-feeling  wears  off,  you  become  quite 
enthusiastic.  You  tell  your  friend  that  this  is 
the  life  that  you  always  wanted  to  lead;  that 
a  man  doesn't  really  live  in  the  city,  but  only 
exists;  that  it  is  a  luxury  to  breathe  such  air, 
and  enjoy  the  peaceful  calm  and  perfect  silence. 
Away  inside  of  you  something  says  that  this 
is  humbug,  for,  the  fact  is,  the  perfect  silence 
strikes  you  as  somewhat  lonesome,  and  it  even 
scares  you  a  little.  Then  your  children  keep 
running  up  to  you  with  strange  plants  and 
flowers,  and  asking  you  what  they  are ;  and 
you  find  it  trying  on  the  nerves  to  keep  up  the 
pretence  of  parental  omniscience,  and  yet  avoid 
the  too-ready  corrections  of  your  friend. 


A  Letter  to   Town 


'Johnny-jumper!"     he     says,      scornfully, 
when    you   have 
hazarded  a  guess 
outof    your 


meagre  botanical  vo- 
cabulary:    "  Why, 
man,   that's  no  Johnny-jumper,   that's  a  wild 


1 86         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

geranium."  Then  he  addresses  himself  to  the 
other  inquiring  youngster:  "  No,  my  boy, 
that's  not  a  chestnut;  that's  an  acorn.  You 
won't  get  chestnuts  till  the  fall,  and  then 
you'll  get  them  off  the  chestnut  trees.  That's 
an  oak." 

And  so  the  walk  is  not  altogether  pleasant 
for  you,  and  you  find  it  safest  to  confine  your 
remarks  on  country  life  to  generalizations  con 
cerning  the  air  and  the  silence. 

No,  Modestus,  do  not  think  for  a  moment 
that  I  am  making  game  of  you.  Your  friend 
would  be  no  more  at  home  at  the  uptown  end 
of  your  little  New  York  path  than  you  are 
here  in  his  little  town  ;  and  he  does  not  look 
on  your  ignorance  of  nature  as  sternly  as  you 
would  look  upon  his  unfamiliarity  with  your 
familiar  landmarks.  For  his  knowledge  has 

o 

grown  upon  him  so  naturally  and  uncon 
sciously,  that  he  hardly  esteems  it  of  any 
value. 

But  you  can  have  no  idea  of  the  tragico- 
comical  disadvantage  at  which  you  will  find 
yourself  placed  during  your  first  year  in  the 
country — that  is,  the  suburban  country.  You 


A   Letter  to   Town  187 

know,  of  course,  when  you  move  into  a  new 
neighborhood  in  the  city  you  must  expect  to 
find  the  local  butcher  and  baker  and  candle 
stick-maker  ready  to  fall  upon  you,  and  to  tear 
the  very  raiment  from  your  back,  until  they 
are  assured  that  you  are  a  solvent  permanency 
— and  you  have  learned  how  to  meet  and  repel 
their  attacks.  When  you  find  that  the  same 
thing  is  done  in  the  country,  only  in  a  differ 
ent  way,  which  you  don't  in  the  least  under 
stand,  you  will  begin  to  experience  a  certain 
feeling  of  discouragement.  Then,  the  humor 
ous  papers  have  taught  you  to  look  upon  the 
Suburban  Furnace  as  part  of  the  machinery 
or  property  of  a  merry  jest ;  and  you  will  be 
shocked  to  discover  that  to  the  new-comer  it 
is  a  stern  and  cold  reality.  I  use  the  latter 
adjective  deliberately  and  advisedly.  There 
will  surely  come  an  awful  night  when  you  will 
get  home  from  New  York  with  Mrs.  Modestus 
in  the  midnight  train,  too  tired  for  anything 
but  a  drowsy  chat  by  the  lingering  embers  of 
the  library  fire  over  the  festivities  of  the 
evening.  You  will  open  your  broad  hospitable 
door,  and  enter  an  abode  of  chill  and  darkness. 


1 88         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

Your  long-slumbering  household  has  let  fires 
and  lights  go  out ;  the  thermometer  in  the 
children's  room  stands  at  forty-five  degrees, 
and  there  is  nothing  for  you  to  do  but  to 
descend  to  the  cellar,  arrayed  in  your  wedding 
garments,  and  try  your  unskilful  best  to  coax 
into  feeble  circulation  a  small,  faintly  throb 
bing  heart  of  fire  that  yet  glows  far  down  in 
the  fire-pot's  darksome  internals.  Then,  when 
you  have  done  \vhat  you  can  at  the  unwonted 
and  unwelcome  task,  you  will  see,  by  the  feeble 
canclle-light,  that  your  black  dress-coat  is  gray 
with  fine  cinder  dust,  and  that  your  hands  are 
red  and  raw  from  the  handling  of  heavy  imple 
ments  of  toil.  And  then  you  will  think  of  city 
home-comings  after  the  theatre  or  the  ball ;  of 
the  quiet  half-hour  in  front  of  the  dying  can- 
nel;  of  the  short  cigar  and  the  little  nightcap, 
and  of  the  gentle  passage  bedward,  so  easy  in 
that  warm  and  slumberous  atmosphere  that 
you  hardly  know  how  you  have  passed  from 
weariness  to  peaceful  dreams.  And  there  will 
come  to  your  spirit  a  sudden  passion  of  humili 
ation  and  revolt  that  will  make  you  say  to 
yourself:  This  is  the  end! 


A  Letter  to   Town 


189 


But  you  know  perfectly  well  that  it  is  not 
the  end,  however  ardently  you  may  wish  that 
it  was.  There  still  remain  two  years  of  your 
un-subletable  lease ;  and  you  set  yourself, 
courageously  and  firmly,  to  serving  out  the 
rest  of  your  time.  You  resolve,  as  a  good 
prisoner,  to  make  the  best  of  it.  You  set  to 
work  to  apply 
a  little  plain 
common  -  sense 
to  the  problem 
of  the  furnace — 
and  find  it  not 
so  difficult  of 
partial  solution 
after  all.  You 
face  your  other 
local  troubles 
with  a  determi 
nation  to  mini 
mize  them  at 
least.  You  re 
solve  to  check 

your    too    open   expressions   of   dissatisfaction 
with    the   life   you    are    leading.      You    hardly 


1 90         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

know  why  you  do  this,  but  you  have,  half- 
unconsciously,  read  a  gentle  hint  in  the  faces 
of  your  neighbors;  and  as  you  see  those  kindly 
faces  gathering  oftener  and  oftener  about  your 
fire  as  the  winter  nights  go  on,  it  may,  per 
haps,  dawn  upon  your  mind  that  the  existence 
you  were  so  quick  to  condemn  has  grown  dear 
to  some  of  them. 

But,  whether  you  know  it  or  not,  that 
second  year  in  the  suburban  house  is  a  crisis 
and  turning-point  in  your  life,  for  it  will  make 
of  you  either  a  city  man  or  a  suburban,  and  it 
will  surely  save  you  from  being,  for  all  the  rest 
of  your  days,  that  hideous  betwixt-ancl-be- 
tvvccn  thing,  that  uncanny  creation  of  modern 
days  of  rapid  transit,  who  fluctuates  helplessly 
between  one  town  and  another;  between  town 
and  city,  and  between  town  and  city  again, 
seeking  an  impossible  and  unattainable  perfec 
tion,  and  scattering  remonstrant  servant-maids 
and  disputed  bills  for  repairs  along  his  cheer 
less  track. 

You  have  learned  that  the  miseries  of  coun 
try  life  are  not  dealt  out  to  you  individually, 
but  that  they  belong  to  the  life,  just  as  the 


A  Letter  to   Town  191 

troubles  you  fled  from  belong  to  the  life  of  a 
great  city.  Of  course,  the  realization  of  this 
fact  only  serves  to  make  you  see  that  you  erred 
in  making  so  radical  a  change  in  the  current  of 
your  life.  You  perceive  only  the  more  clearly 
that  as  soon  as  your  appointed  time  is  up,  you 
must  reestablish  yourself  in  urban  conditions. 
There  is  no  question  about  it;  whatever  its 
merits  may  be — and  you  are  willing  to  concede 
that  they  are  many — it  is  obvious  that  coun 
try  life  does  not  suit  you,  or  that  you  do  not 
suit  country  life,  one  or  the  other.  And  yet — 
somehow  incomprehensibly — the  understand 
ing  that  you  have  only  shifted  the  burden  you 
bore  among  your  old  neighbors  has  put  a 
strangely  new  face  on  things,  and  has  made 
you  so  readily  tolerant  that  you  are  really  a 
little  surprised  at  yourself. 

The  winter  goes  by;  the  ever  welcome  glory 
of  the  spring  comes  back,  and  with  it  comes 
the  natural  human  longing  to  make  a  garden, 
which  is  really,  although  we  treat  it  lightly,  a 
sort  of  humble  first-cousin  to  the  love  of  chil 
dren.  In  your  own  breast  you  repress  this 
weakness.  Why  taste  of  a  pleasure  which  in 


1 92         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

another  short  year  you   mean  to  put   perma 
nently  out   of  your   reach  ?     But  there   is  no 


resisting  the  entreaties  of  your  children,  nor 
your  wife's  ready  interest  in  their  schemes, 
and  you  send  for  Pat  Brannigan,  and  order  a 


A   Letter  to   Town  193 

garden  made.  Of  course,  it  is  only  for  the 
children,  but  it  is  strange  how  readily  a  desire 
to  please  the  little  ones  spreads  into  a  broader 
benevolence.  When  you  look  over  your 
wife's  list  of  plants  and  seeds,  you  are  surprised 
to  find  how  many  of  them  arc  perennials. 
'  They  will  please  the  next  tenants  here,"  says 
your  wife;  "think  how  nice  it  would  have 
been  for  us  to  find  some  flowers  all  already  for 
us,  when  we  came  here!  "  This  may  possibly 
lead  you  to  reflecting  that  there  might  have 
been  something,  after  all,  in  your  original  idea 
of  suppressing  the  gardening  instinct. 

But  there,  after  a  while,  is  the  garden — for 
these  stories  of  suburban  gardens  where  noth 
ing  grows,  are  all  nonsense.  True,  the  clematis 
and  the  moonflower  obstinately  refuse  to 
clothe  your  cot  with  beauty;  the  tigridia  bulbs 
rot  in  the  ground,  and  your  beautiful  collection 
of  irises  produces  a  pitiful  pennyworth  of 
bloom  to  an  intolerable  quantity  of  leaves. 
But  the  petunias  and  the  sweet-williams,  and 
the  balsams,  and  all  the  other  ill-bred  and 
obtrusive  flowers  leap  promptly  into  life  and 
vigor,  and  fight  each  other  for  the  ownership 
13 


1 94         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

of  the  beds.  And  the  ever-faithful  and  friendly 
nasturtium  comes  early  and  stays  late,  and  the 
limp  morning-glory  may  always  be  counted 
upon  to  slouch  familiarly  over  everything  in 
sight,  window-blinds  preferred.  But,  bless 
you  dear  urban  soul,  what  do  yon  know  about 
the  relative  values  of  flowers  ?  When  Mrs. 
Overtheway  brings  your  wife  a  bunch  of  her 
superbest  gladioli,  you  complacently  return 
the  compliment  with  a  half-bushel  of  magenta 
petunias,  and  you  wonder  that  she  does  not 
show  more  enthusiasm  over  the  gift. 

In  fact,  during  the  course  of  the  summer 
you  have  grown  so  friendly  with  your  garden 
that,  as  you  wander  about  its  tangled  paths  in 
the  late  fall  days,  you  cannot  help  feeling  a 
twinge  of  yearning  pain  that  makes  you 
tremble  to  think  what  weakness  you  might 
have  been  guilty  of  had  you  not  already  burned 
your  bridges  behind  you,  and  told  the  house 
agent  that  nothing  wrould  induce  you  to  renew 
the  lease  next  spring.  You  remember  how 
fully  and  carefully  you  explained  to  him  your 
position  in  the  matter.  With  a  glow  of  mod 
est  pride  you  recall  the  fact  that  you  stated 


A  Letter  to   Town  195 

your  case  to  him  so  convincingly,  that  he  had 
to  agree  with  you  that  a  city  life  was  the  only 
life  you  and  your  family  could  possibly  lead. 
He  understood  fully  how  much  you  liked  the 
place  and  the  people,  and  how,  if  this  were 
only  so,  and  that  were  only  the  other  way,  you 
would  certainly  stay.  And  you  feel  if  the 
house  agent  agrees  with  you  against  his  own 
interest,  you  must  be  right  in  your  decision. 
Ah,  dear  Modestus!  You  know  little  enough 

o 

about  flowers;  but  oh,  how  little,  little,  little 
you  know  about  suburban  house  agents! 

Let  us  pass  lightly  over  the  third  winter. 
It  is  a  period  of  hesitation,  perplexity,  expect 
ancy,  and  general  awkwardness.  You  are,  and 
you  are  not.  You  belong  nowhere,  and  to  no 
one.  You  have  renounced  your  new  allegi 
ance,  and  you  really  do  not  know  when,  how, 
or  at  what  point  you  are  going  to  take  up  the 
old  one  again.  And,  in  point  of  fact,  you 
do  not  regard  this  particular  prospect  with 
feelings  of  complete  satisfaction.  You  remem 
ber,  with  a  troubled  conscience,  the  long  list 
of  social  connections  which  you  have  found  it 
too  troublesome  to  keep  up  at  long  range.  I 


196         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

say  you,  for  I  am  quite  sure  that  Mrs.  Modes- 
tus  will  certify  me  that  it  was  You  and  not 
She,  who  first  declared  that  it  was  practically 
impossible  to  keep  on  going  to  the  Smith's 
dinners  or  the  Brown's  receptions.  You  don't 
know  this,  my  clear  Modestus,  but  I  assure 
you  that  you  may  take  it  for  granted.  You 
remember  also  that  your  return  must  carry 
with  it  the  suggestion  of  the  ignominy  of 
defeat,  and  you  know  exactly  the  tone  of 
kindly  contemptuous,  mildly  assumed  superi 
ority  with  which  your  friends  will  welcome  you 
back.  And  the  approaching  severance  of  your 
newer  ties  troubles  your  mind  in  another  way. 
Your  new  friends  do  not  try  to  dissuade  you 
from  going  (they  are  too  wise  in  a  suburban 
way  for  that),  but  they  say,  and  show  in  a 
hundred  ways,  that  they  are  sorry  to  think  of 
losing  you.  And  this  forbearance,  so  differ 
ent  from  what  you  have  to  expect  at  the  other 
end  of  your  moving,  reproaches  and  pains 
while  it  touches  your  heart.  These  people 
were  all  strangers  to  you  two  years  and  a  half 
ago ;  they  are  chance  rather  than  chosen  com 
panions.  And  yet,  in  this  brief  space  of  time 


A  Letter  to   Town  197 

—filled  with  little  neighborly  offices,  with 
faithful  services  and  tender  sympathies  in 
hours  of  sickness,  and  perhaps  of  death,  with 
simple,  informal  companionship — you  have 
grown  into  a  closer  and  heartier  friendship 
with  them  than  you  have  ever  known  before, 
save  with  the  one  or  two  old  comrades  with 
whose  love  your  life  is  bound  up.  When  you 
learned  to  leave  your  broad  house-door  open 
to  the  summer  airs,  you  opened,  uncon 
sciously,  another  door;  and  these  friends  have 
entered  in. 

It  is  a  sunny  Saturday  afternoon  in  early 
April,  but  not  exactly  an  April  afternoon, 
rather  one  of  those  precocious  days  of  delicious 
warmth  and  full,  summer-like  sunshine,  that 
come  to  remind  us  that  May  and  June  are 
close  behind  the  spring  showers.  You  and 
Mrs.  Modestus  sit  on  the  top  step  of  your 
front  veranda,  just  as  you  sat  there  on  such  a 
day,  nearly  three  years  ago.  As  on  that  day, 
you  are  talking  of  the  future ;  but  you  are  in 
a  very  different  frame  of  mind  to-day.  In  a 
few  short  weeks  you  will  be  adrift  upon  a  sea 


198         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

of  domestic  uncertainty.  For  weeks  you  have 
visited  the  noisy  city,  hunting  the  proud  and 
lofty  mansion  and  the  tortuous  and  humiliat 
ing  flat,  and  it  has  all  come  to  this — a  steam- 
heated  "  family-hotel,"  until  such  time  when 
you  can  find  summer  quarters;  and  then,  with 
the  fall,  a  new  beginning  of  the  weary  search. 
And  then — and  then — 

Coming  and  going  along  the  street,  your 
friends  and  neighbors  give  you  cheery  greet 
ing,  to  which  you  respond  somewhat  absent- 
mindedly.  You  can  hear  the  voices  of  your 
children  and  their  little  neighbor-friends  play 
ing  in  the  empty  garden  plot.  Your  talk  flags. 
You  do  not  know  just  what  you  are  thinking 
about;  still  less  do  you  know  what  your  wife 
is  thinking  about — but  you  know  that  you 
wish  the  children  would  stop  laughing,  and 
that  the  people  would  stop  going  by  and  nod 
ding  pleasantly. 

And  now  comes  one  who  does  not  go  by. 
He  turns  in  at  the  gate  and  walks  up  the 
gravel  path.  He  smiles  and  bows  at  you  as  if 
the  whole  world  were  sunshine — a  trim  little 
figure,  dressed  with  such  artistic  care  that 


A  Letter  to   Town  199 

there  is  cheerfulness  in  the  crease  of  his 
trousers  and  suavity  in  his  very  shirt-front. 
He  greets  Mrs.  Modestus  with  a  world  of  cour- 

o 

tesy,  and  then  he  sits  confidentially  down  by 
your  side  and  says:  "  My  dear  sir,  I  am  come 
to  talk  a  little  business  with  you." 

•No,  you  will  not  talk  business.  Your  mind 
is  firmly  made  up.  Nothing  will  induce  you 
to  renew  the  lease. 

But,  my  dear  sir,"  he  says,  with  an  enthu 
siasm  that  would  be  as  boisterous  as  an  ocean 
wave,  if  it  had  not  so  much  oil  on  its  surface: 

I  don't  want  you  to  renew  the  lease.  I  have 
a  much  better  plan  than  that !  I  want  you  to 
buy  tJic  Jwnse  !  ' ' 

And  then  he  goes  on  to  tell  you  all  about 
it;  how  the  estate  must  be  closed  up;  how  the 
house  may  be  had  for  a  song;  and  he  names  a 
figure  so  small  that  it  gives  you  two  separate 
mental  shocks ;  first,  to  realize  that  it  is  within 
your  means;  second,  to  find  that  he  is  telling 
the  truth. 

He  goes  on  talking  softly,  suggestively,  tell 
ing  you  what  a  bargain  it  is,  telling  you  all  the 
things  you  have  put  out  of  your  mind  for  many 


2OO         Jersey  Street  and  Jersey  Lane 

months;  telling  you — telling  you  nothing,  and 
well  he  knows  it.  Three  years  of  life  under 
that  roof  have  done  his  pleading  for  him. 


Then  your  wife  suddenly  reaches  out  her 
hand  and  touches  you  furtively. 

"  Oh,  buy  it,"  she  whispers,  huskily,  "if 
you  can."  And  then  she  gathers  up  her 
skirts  and  hurries  into  the  house. 


A   Letter  to   Town  201 

Then  a  little  later  you  are  all  in  the  library, 
and  you  have  signed  a  little  plain  strip  of 
paper,  headed  "  Memorandum  of  Sale."  And 
then  you  and  the  agent  have  drunk  a  glass  of 
wine  to  bind  the  bargain,  and  then  the  agent 
is  gone,  and  you  and  your  wife  are  left  stand 
ing  there,  looking  at  each  other  with  misty 
eyes  and  questioning  smiles,  happy  and  yet 
doubtful  if  you  have  done  right  or  wrong. 

But  what  does  it  matter,  my  dear  Modestus  ? 

For  you  could  not  help  yourselves. 


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verse  that  America  has  sent  us  for  many  years.  In  its 
brightness,  its  humor,  its  pathos,  and  its  general  hold  of 
reality,  it  is  often  truly  delightful.  There  is  not  a  poem  in 
the  collection  that  has  not  its  own  peculiar  merit." 

— London  Academy. 

Rowen         &         ^         ^ 

Second  Crop  Songs.     121110,  $1.25. 

"  Mr.  Bunner  sustains  well  his  reputation  as  a  poet  who 
can  turn  from  one  meter  to  another  and  quite  different  one, 
and  from  one  theme  to  another  of  a  very  dissimilar  character, 

and  show  an  equal  mastery  of  each." 

—  The  Congregationalism 


CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS, 


NEW  YORK 


14  DAY  USE 

KETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT, 


This 


ow,  or 


^J»-W-?=!==t 

_., 

18Mar'65BG 

— — 

_REC!D-LD- 


LD  2lA-60m-4,'64 
(E4555slO)476B 


dersey  st] 

*eet  and  der 

sey     je 

_^—  

M295967 


